Mehrin (Mir) Masud-Elias, Esq.

Board Chair & Corporate Secretary

Ms. Masud-Elias, originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is Counsel at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington, DC, focusing on research collaboration transactions for tax-exempt entities. Previously, she served as Head of Legal for the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and oversaw all aspects of UPenn's clinical and scientific research collaboration activities in oncology.

Prior to UPenn, she was a corporate transactional lawyer in private practice focusing on the healthcare and life sciences industries for 11+ years. She holds several volunteer leadership and fundraising roles with various nonprofit and professional organizations and has been recognized for her professional achievements by a number of legal publications in the United States. She is a graduate of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston's Business on Board program.

She holds a Masters in Bioethics from UPenn, a JD from Columbia University School of Law, and a BA in English and Physics from Amherst College and the California Institute of Technology/CALTECH.

Mir is a poet whose aspiration is to challenge essentialist notions of what South Asian immigrant narratives can be. She has published poems in collected editions and journals and written essays for a Leeway Foundation grant-funded food blog. She is the recipient of the 2021 William Carlos Williams/Peregrine Prize from the American Academy of Poets and the 2022 Universe in Verse Prize from the Kelly Writers House at UPenn, and she hosted and curated the quarterly 12G Poetic Circleat Twelve Gates Arts. Her debut poetry manuscript is titled In/finite Body.