LTU’s Assistant Professor for Public Policy Jessi Hanson-DeFusco, PhD, has been on a career-long international journey from teaching high school to teaching college. “I spent about 20 years off and on overseas. My first career was in international development, technical consulting for US government and UN-funded projects supporting human rights in Latin America and Africa.
“I really got pulled into this by way of the Peace Corps after graduation,” Hanson-DeFusco recalled, serving from 2003 to 2005 in the Dominican Republic. “I applied to Harvard so that I could go from being a high school teacher to doing international education programming like building schools in low-income nations,” she said. Earlier trained as an educator with a Bachelor of Arts in English education/ESL-Spanish from Colorado State University, she earned an Ed.M. in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
A Global Journey Shaped by Service
“I saw the poverty and how that affected learning and teaching, and I wanted to help make schools better in countries that don’t have the resources that we have,” she recalled. What’s more, she said, “I got paid to live in beautiful places with incredible people.” Hanson-DeFusco built a very large international family. Her five-year-old daughter has “godparents” from eight different countries!
During the Ebola outbreak in 2021, “I came back to the United States and decided to get my PhD,” which she received from the University of Pittsburgh. Hanson-DeFusco taught at the University of Texas at Dallas as well as the University of Pittsburgh. What drew Hanson-DeFusco was the culture of inclusion from the administration to the department level.
“When I got to interview at LTU and met the team, it was obvious how they support inclusion and diversity among the students and the faculty. The faculty really care about their students from all diverse backgrounds, and the students feel very cared for here.”
Student-Driven Research with Real-World Impact
Much of Hanson-DeFusco’s research focuses on human rights, especially when it comes to health policy and gender equity, primarily in Africa. Her students have been engaged in research on acid-attack violence in conjunction with CERESAV and Hanifa Nakiryowa, who was the guest speaker at the November 4th Hotelling Lecture. CERESAV is The Centre for Rehabilitation of Survivors of Acid and Burns Violence, a non-governmental organization established in 2012 to address acid violence in Uganda.
She explained, “I am using my courses to get my students to dive into research on real-world policy issues, and to produce data that can be used to inform human rights and policymaking. This year, we had nearly 20 students research about 60 countries to help compile a first-ever extensive database on acid-attack incidences, policies, cases, and target populations of victims. CERESAV will use this data to share on its website to promote awareness, and we will work with several LTU students to do a formal paper on it, as well as present at the conference in March 2026.”
Teaching Ethics at the Intersection of Policy and Technology
Hanson-DeFusco’s role as public policy professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication is to encourage students to ask the ethical questions we should be asking. Think about technology, health care, and democracy, and how those link together. Should people’s data be open and available? What are you going to do to make meaningful change?
Hanson-DeFusco also teaches a Gender Policy class. Using film, students study gender minorities, including women, cisgender women and men, LGBTQ+ populations, and how they wielded power to survive and will wield power in an era where rights are being taken away.
So many of the countries she’s been to would love to have the democratic system “we have here. But democracy isn’t about you having rights. Rights come with responsibility, and you will lose those rights if you do not enact your responsibilities by peaceful protesting, by voting, and by paying taxes,” she continued. “It’s important that your understanding is robust because a 20-second TikTok feed is not really the truth!”
By: Renée Ahee
