Jim Keen Visiting Fellow
Jim grew up in suburban Minneapolis MN and Chicago IL and trained in biology (BS, Eastern Kentucky), veterinary medicine (DVM, Illinois) and epidemiology (PhD, Illinois). He worked primarily as a veterinary infectious disease and public health researcher at the USDA in Nebraska and at the University of Nebraska over the past 30 years. During the past decade, he slowly converted from industrial agriculture supporter and enabler (by his research) to sustainable agriculture proponent and animal protection advocate. This was manifest by his role in 2015 as a whistleblower of livestock abuse at the USDA’s Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html).
His current interests include working towards more sustainable environment-people-animal friendly agricultural-food systems and improving the welfare of industrial factory-farmed livestock and of animals used in biomedical or agricultural research. He is an active animal protection volunteer with several organizations.
Jim taught high school science with the US Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa for two years in the 1980s. From 2007 to 2014, he was a consultant on dangerous veterinary pathogens in Azerbaijan and Armenia for the US Department of Defense. He was a Visiting Fellow with the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School from 2019-2020.
