Who We Are

Mikalah is an attorney with a Certificate in Animal Law and an LLM in Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law from Lewis & Clark Law School. She is licensed to practice law in Oregon. She earned her BA in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Case Western Reserve University where she worked on research related to ethics and dehumanization.

Mikalah has worked on legal issues and policy for multiple non-profit organizations including the Animal Welfare Institute, International Environmental Law Project, Mercy For Animals, and the Green Energy Institute. Her work has ranged from farmed animal welfare and wildlife trade regulations to renewable energy policy. Mikalah is a former Postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Environmental Health and Engineering Department. She worked as part of the Toxicology Policy team and specialized in policy changes the National Institutes of Health can make in its grant-making process to be more inclusive of the use and development of in vitro and in silica models in biomedical research.

Aside from being our Executive Director, Mikalah is the Public Policy Manager at the Center for Contemporary Sciences working on the public health implications of animal exploitation including industrial agriculture, animal experimentation, and wildlife trade. Mikalah is the Co-Regional Director of Northern America for the World Moot on International Law and Animal Rights, a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, the Chair-Elect for the Animal Law Section of the Oregon Bar, and has been published in both law and scientific journals for her work on alternatives to animal experimentation.