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Global Leadership and Innovation Summits
Geneva 2007 Scholar
 Courtney Green Matson
Ambassador Scholar – LA 2006
B.A., International Studies, Chinese Literature and
Culture
Middlebury College (Vermont) |
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| Courtney Matson is the Outreach and External
Programs Director at Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) and
is the coordinator for all of AID’s Global Health programming.
Courtney founded the Middlebury chapter of the Student Global
AIDS Campaign (SGAC), and has worked at numerous AIDS
organizations and NGOs in New York, Los Angeles and China. She
writes and speaks fluent Mandarin and studied at the Zhejiang
University of Technology in Hangzhou, China.
“I was impressed by the number of participants at the
conference, many of whom had gone to great lengths and come many
miles to attend the conference. Additionally, I was impressed by
the breadth of perspectives conveyed within the topic of
intellectual property rights and the eighth Millennium
Development Goal. This forum gave me the opportunity to look
at an issue that I personally feel very strongly about - access
to essential medicines by people in poor and developing
countries – very differently.
Global development is often broadly understood by many
merely as relating to economic development, but this is a very
narrow view of the concept of development and one which does not
fully incorporate the other seven goals in it. By understanding
how IP rights relate to issues like access to essential
medicines such as AIDS drugs, I realized that in certain areas,
it does not make sense to strictly enforce the patents that
pharmaceutical companies have on such drugs because it denies
people in poor and developing countries the ability to access
those drugs, as their cost is prohibitively high.”
Personal Position Paper
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 I was impressed by the number of participants at the conference, many of whom had gone to great lengths and come many miles to attend the conference. 
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