Marisa B. Van Saanen, a Maryland resident, is now a Yale Law School student, and was last Faith Liaison for the World Bank, working with religious leaders and institutions on development and poverty issues. She traveled for the World Bank on five continents, representing the World Bank in a variety of settings, including on health and HIV/AIDS issues.  She is co-author, with Katherine Marshall, of the 2007 World Bank book, Development and Faith: Where Mind, Heart, and Soul Work Together.

Coming from a working class family, Marisa has a passion for working on poverty and policy issues and deep commitment to social justice.  She thinks it is possible to end poverty in our lifetimes, and to help make this happen is all of our responsibilities.  Marisa interested in working on domestic and global policies that help ensure that all people have access to opportunity and the chance to live a decent and good life.

Marisa has worked in a variety of contexts, with the goal to understand how best social change can be made, across sectors, within institutions and governments. She has worked with Senator Barbara Mikulski on health and aging issues and with President Clinton's AIDS Czar Sandy Thurman in the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, as well as volunteered for four presidential campaigns.  She has worked with social workers in rural Iowa on child protection issues; with Bread for the World, a citizen's movement aiming to end world hunger; and with a social entrepreneur aiming to build an Asian University for Women in Bangladesh.  She has volunteered with a variety of grassroots organizations working on poverty, health, AIDS issues.  She has twice co-taught a class in India for her alma mater, Wellesley College, on the Gandhian Legacy, Grassroots Development, and Conflict Resolution.  

Marisa is a Truman and Marshall Scholar and a 2001 graduate of Wellesley College, where she studied Political Science and Peace and Justice Studies, and was President of College Government and a Young Alumna member of Wellesley's Board of Trustees (2001-2004). Marisa is a 2004 graduate of University College, University of Oxford, where she completed an MPhil in International Relations, writing her thesis on the WTO, Public Health, and Access to Essential Medicines.  She is currently a member of the Marshall Scholars Association Board of Directors and a Truman Security Project Fellow.

At Yale Law School, Marisa is Executive Editor for Submissions for the Human Rights and Development Law Journal, a Board member of Yale Law Women, in a law clinic working on mortgage foreclosure issues in New Haven, and a research assistant to the Law School Deans for the law school's emerging Law and Health Initiative.