Meg Gaines, JD, LLM

Meg Gaines is a lawyer, professor and the founder of the Center for Patient Partnerships at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an interdisciplinary program that trains students in law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health to advocate alongside patients facing serious illness.

Her work grew out of her own experience with advanced ovarian cancer in her thirties, when she was given months to live and had to fight for treatment. She has spent the decades since building a model of patient advocacy that treats patients as partners rather than recipients of care.