Professor Chugh has taught Health Law & Policy as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and she is currently an attorney at the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP where she is a member of the Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation and Government and Regulatory Litigation Practice Groups. She clerked for Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

During the 2004 presidential election, Professor Chugh served as the Director of Health Care Policy for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. She was the Policy Director on Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s 2002 campaign, and from 2001-2002, she worked on health care policy for Senator Edward Kennedy. During her time in the U.S. Senate, she helped develop and pass the Health Care Safety Net Amendments, which increased funding for community health centers and the National Health Service Corps program, as well as created the Healthy Communities Access Program. In 1998, Professor Chugh served as Deputy Communications Director on Tom Vilsack’s successful gubernatorial campaign in Iowa, where he was the first Democrat to be elected governor in more than 30 years. She then served as the Deputy Communications Director in the Governor’s office, where she organized a coalition of seventy groups to help pass legislation that invested Iowa’s share of a large tobacco settlement in creating and expanding health care programs.

In 2009, at the invitation of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Professor Chugh published the article Executive Authority to Reform Health, which analyzed the scope of the President’s constitutional and statutory power to enact health care reform. She also co-authored an essay with Senator Tom Daschle entitled Cost Containment: Finding New Tools for an Old Problem, which will be published by the Brookings Institution in the forthcoming book, “Beyond Learned Helplessness: Solving America’s Health Care Cost Conundrum.” In addition to health law, her primary research interests are administrative law and constitutional law.

Professor Chugh graduated from Yale Law School where she was a Book Reviews & Features Editor on The Yale Law Journal. She also holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University, during which time she received the Soros Fellowship for New Americans. A native of Longview, Texas, Professor Chugh majored in journalism and government at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with honors and election to Phi Beta Kappa. During her senior year, she was named the University of Texas Outstanding Female Student of the Year.

Scholar, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law

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