Who We Are

On-call Scientists are experts from all scientific fields and disciplines who are ready to contribute their time and expertise to the challenges faced by organizations that promote, monitor, and protect human rights throughout the world.

Through On-call Scientists, the AAAS Center for Scientific Responsibility and Justice (SRJ) seeks to encourage greater engagement of scientists, engineers, and health professionals in human rights efforts and to raise greater awareness within the human rights community of the specific tools, expertise, and other resources that these experts can bring to their work.

From its inception, SRJ has called attention to the wealth of specialized knowledge that scientists, engineers, and health professionals can bring to the range of technical and substantive issues critical to conducting human rights work. SRJ projects have included geneticists developing DNA analysis to identify the children of the “disappeared” in Argentina, anthropologists and forensic specialists examining the remains of victims of mass killings, statisticians analyzing the extent of violence against and displacement of civilians during war, and geographers using high tech mapping tools to document destruction of villages and mass displacement. Through these pioneering efforts, SRJ has developed extensive experience in bringing scientists, engineers, and health professionals, and their expertise and tools, to human rights work.