Karuna Jaggar

Karuna Jaggar is the climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, where she wages strategic campaigns to end the fossil fuel era. Prior to that, Karuna served for a decade as the executive director for the independent health justice watchdog Breast Cancer Action (BCAction) working to achieve health justice for all women at risk of and living with breast cancer.

BCAction boldly challenged the status quo and was the only breast cancer organization plaintiff in the groundbreaking case that challenged Myriad Genetics’ patents on the human BRCA genes, a case which was won when the Supreme Court unanimously struck down human gene patents in 2013.

In addition to demanding more effective, less toxic treatments, BCAction worked to eliminate environmental exposures that drive up breast cancer risk in the first place. BCAction always put people’s health before corporate profit, and the organization’s strict conflict of interest policy included refusing all funding from entities that profited from or whose products increased the risk of breast cancer.

Karuna has been a leading voice challenging the status quo in the breast cancer industry and go-to resource for the media on breast cancer issues. She published op-eds and other pieces in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, The LA Times, EcoWatch, HuffingtonPost, Ms. Magazine, and other national publications. She was a special guest of Samantha Bee on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2014 in a piece challenging “Pink Drill Bits for the Cure."

Before joining Breast Cancer Action, Karuna’s work focused on women's economic and social rights and she was the first executive director for the East Bay Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, which provided training, funding and support to low-income entrepreneurs in English and Spanish.

She holds a master’s degree in economic and political geography from the University of California, Berkeley, with a special emphasis on women, gender, and sexuality, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Smith College.

Karuna is also an alumna of LeaderSpring and The Dr. Beatriz Maria Soliz Policy Institute.

Everyone who is living with or at risk of breast cancer deserves evidence-based, people-centered, accessible information free from corporate influence, which is why I'm honored to help Our Bodies Ourselves launch this important new issue area.