During her years as a student, Bernadette Tiso focused sharply on health care: She used her Thouron Award to study health policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford, then returned to Penn Law with a focus on health issues. Today, she is deputy general counsel to the New York Blood Center, a major nonprofit blood collection and distribution organization which also focuses on the science of blood diseases such as HIV, leukemia and sickle cell anemia. But Tiso’s Thouron year expanded her goals in a broader sense: it inspired a lifelong craving for knowledge of other cultures. “I traveled more and met more culturally diverse people during that single year than during the rest of the years of my life combined.”
