Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby, MPH, JD, will join the faculty of the Temple University Beasley School of Law and its Center for Public Health Law Research during the 2025-2026 academic year. She will hold the Judge Clifford Scott Green Chair in Law. 

Professor Yearby is an expert in bioethics, civil rights, public health law, and legal epidemiology whose scholarship focuses on justice in medical research, structural racism, public health, and health justice. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Professor Yearby will continue a project supported by the National Institutes of Health studying structural racism and discrimination in vaccine allocation.  

 “I’m delighted that Professor Yearby will join Temple Law,” said Dean Rachel Rebouché. “Her teaching, scholarship, and service are exceptional, and she will create new opportunities for our students while advancing our mission of access and excellence.” 

“I’m thrilled to have Professor Yearby as a colleague. She adds so much to the breadth and depth of our health law program at Temple,” said Scott Burris, professor at the Beasley School of Law and director of the Center for Public Health Law Research. 

Professor Yearby’s scholarship has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences.  

Prior to joining the faculty at Temple University Beasley School of Law, Professor Yearby was the inaugural Kara J. Trott Professor in Health Law at Moritz, professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy at the College of Public Health, and a faculty affiliate of the Kirwan Institute at The Ohio State University. She is also co-founder of the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and one of the co-founders of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity.  

Professor Yearby has also held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, Saint Louis University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Connecticut, University Buffalo, and Loyola University Chicago. She also worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as an Assistant Regional Counsel and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.  

In 2023, Professor Yearby was appointed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), which was tasked with developing recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of Human Research Protections regarding institutional review boards and the use of human subjects in research.