Briana Torres is the 2025 Maeve McKean Women’s Law and Public Policy – O’Neill Institute Fellow. In this role, she will advance health equity with a focus on women’s health and reproductive justice, addressing systemic barriers, such as inadequate health care access, gender-biased medical practices, and limited reproductive health resources.
Torres’ fellowship centers on developing legal and policy strategies to strengthen reproductive rights and collaborating with organizational partners to promote transformative justice at the intersections of health care, economic justice, and human rights.
During law school, Torres built a robust legal and advocacy portfolio. She worked as a research assistant on pregnancy criminalization, wrote papers on women’s health and safety in immigration detention facilities, and represented survivors of gender-based violence as a student attorney in the Violence Against Women Clinic. As president of SMU Dedman’s If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice chapter, she organized high-profile programming that brought together community organizers, medical professionals, attorneys, and policymakers to advance dialogue on reproductive rights and gender justice.
She further developed her expertise through internships with the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the National Women’s Law Center, and Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.
Prior to law school, Torres served in the AmeriCorps VISTA program and later as a VISTA Leader in Austin, Texas, supporting community-based initiatives to address poverty and expand access to health and social services.
Torres earned her J.D. from SMU Dedman School of Law and her B.A. in Plan II Honors and English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was an advocacy columnist for The Daily Texan and president of the university’s It’s On Us chapter.