Early in her career, Eunice Aikins-Afful worked as a clinical research coordinator at Johns Hopkins University. She spent five years in breast health services and the Neurosurgery Department interacting with patients who received a cancer diagnosis and needed help navigating radiation, surgery and other treatment options.
After Aikins-Afful started at Suffolk University Law School in 2012, she still wanted to support cancer patients and discovered what was then the ABA’s Breast Cancer Initiatives Task Force. The Commission on Women in the Profession had launched the pro bono project in 1993 to provide information on legal issues related to women’s health and resources to lawyers and patients facing breast cancer. It later moved to the Health Law Section.
“When you take on something like a law degree or a medical degree, there is an obligation to help someone other than yourself,” says Aikins-Afful, a clinical research project manager at BeiGene, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re blessed to be able to do what we do, and then turn it around to someone who can’t do it for themselves. And it doesn’t have to be altruistic and fancy. It can simply just be answering a question.”
Aikins-Afful now chairs the project, which became the Cancer Legal Advocacy Interest Group. It expanded its mission to protect the legal rights of all cancer patients and their families in 2019. The group continues to train attorneys on how to help those facing a cancer...
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