Ms. Leisher spent 25 years working on global poverty alleviation in Asia, Africa and Central America. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, spent 10 years in Vietnam where she was Country Representative for Oxfam Hong Kong, and was director and then vice-president for programs of Trickle Up, an NGO focused on reduction of extreme poverty. She is an honorary research fellow at the Mater Research Institute of the University of Queensland, Australia and holds an MA in international economics and social change & development from Johns Hopkins University and an MSc in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently a doctoral student in epidemiology at Columbia University; her dissertation focuses on maternal stress and stillbirth. Ms Leisher is the mother of three living sons and Wilder Daniel, stillborn on July 13, 1999, with no cause found.