Jessie Brunner

Jessie Brunner serves as Associate Director of Strategy and Program Development and Director of Human Trafficking Research at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University. She is responsible for managing several of the Center's core interdisciplinary collaborations and research activities, in addition to advising on overall Center strategy. Jessie currently researches issues relevant to data collection and ethical data use in the human trafficking field, with a focus on Brazil and Southeast Asia. She works on these issues at the local level with the San Francisco Mayor’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking and at the global level as a member of Knowledge Platform Reference Group of Alliance 8.7, which helps set the UN agenda on Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 related to human trafficking and forced labor. Furthermore, in her role as co-Principal Investigator of the Re:Structure Lab, Jessie is investigating how supply chains and business models can be re-imagined to promote equitable labour standards, worker rights, and abolish forced labour. She is also Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab, guiding the Lab’s overall strategy and establishing key relationships and connections with the global anti-trafficking community.

Previously, Jessie served as a researcher at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law’s Program on Human Rights; a Public Affairs Assistant at the State Department in the Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; a reporter for Los Angeles Times Community News; and a non-profit public relations/marketing manager. In addition to serving as a trial monitor at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Jessie has worked on human rights and post-conflict reconciliation in Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Rwanda, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Brunner earned a MA in International Policy from Stanford University and a BA in Mass Communications and a Spanish minor from the University of California, Berkeley.