Dayna Bowen Matthew

Dayna Bowen Matthew Speaker Biography

Dayna Matthew, a leader in public health who focuses on racial disparities in health care, joined the Virginia faculty in 2017. She is the author of the book "Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care."

Matthew previously served on the University of Colorado law faculty as a professor, vice dean and associate dean of academic affairs. She was a member of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities on the Anschutz Medical Campus and held a joint appointment at the Colorado School of Public Health.

She has also taken on many public policy roles. Matthew worked with a law firm partner in 2013 to found the Colorado Health Equity Project, a medical-legal partnership incubator aimed at removing barriers to good health for low-income clients by providing legal representation, research, and policy advocacy. In 2015 she served as the senior adviser to the director of the Office of Civil Rights for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she expedited cases on behalf of historically vulnerable communities besieged by pollution. She then became a member of the health policy team for U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and worked on public health issues.

During 2015-16 she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, in residence in Washington, D.C., and pivoted her work toward population-level clients. She forged relationships with influential policy groups such as the Brookings Institution, where she is currently a non-resident senior fellow and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Before academia, Matthew practiced as a civil litigator both in Kentucky, at the law firm of Greenebaum, Doll, and McDonald, and in Virginia, at McGuireWoods, where her work primarily focused on the defense of medical care providers and corporate manufacturers in state courts, federal courts, and before administrative and licensing tribunals.

Matthew graduated with an A.B. in economics from Harvard-Radcliffe and, after a brief stint as a commercial real estate banker, obtained a J.D. from the University of Virginia. While studying at Virginia, Matthew served as an editor of the Virginia Law Review, won the Law School's William Minor Lile Moot Court Competition, and taught as a Hardy Dillard Writing Fellow. Following graduation, Matthew clerked for Justice John Charles Thomas, the first African-American justice to sit on the Virginia Supreme Court. She taught at Virginia as an assistant professor from 1991-94. In 2018, she received a Ph.D. in health and behavioral sciences from the University of Colorado at Denver.

Matthew has written articles on health and antitrust law topics that have appeared in the Virginia Law Review, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives, and the American Journal of Law and Medicine, among others.

She is the recipient of several awards, including the Colorado University School of Law's Clifford Calhoun Faculty Award for Public Service (May 2015) and the Margaret Willard Award (2015, presented by the University Women's Club of Boulder). She was recently named one of the Top 25 Most Powerful Women (2016) by the Colorado Women's Chamber of Commerce.