San Francisco, CA
Karuna Jaggar is the executive director of Breast Cancer Action (BCAction), a national education and activist nonprofit organization working to achieve health justice for all women at risk of and living with breast cancer. Based in San Francisco, BCAction is known for its pioneering conflict-of-interest policy and has been widely recognized as the watchdog for the breast cancer movement. Jaggar is a leading voice challenging the status quo in the breast cancer industry and a go-to resource for the media when it comes to breast cancer issues. She has been published in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, the LA Times, EcoWatch, Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine and other national publications. In 2014 Jaggar was a special guest of Samantha Bee’s on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in a piece challenging “Pink Drill Bits for the Cure.”
A highlight of her first three years occurred when the Supreme Court struck down human gene patents in 2013, a win for BCAction and women everywhere. Before she joined BCAction, Jaggar’s work focused on women's economic and social rights, and she was the first executive director for the East Bay Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, which provided training, funding and support to low-income entrepreneurs. Jaggar holds a master’s degree in economic geography from University of California Berkeley, with a special emphasis on women, gender and sexuality, and received her BA in philosophy from Smith College. She is an alumna of the Women’s Policy Institute, a program of the Women’s Foundation of California.