Mazelle Etessami is a third-year J.D. student at Harvard Law School and has been a Research Assistant for the HLS Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (HLS PILAC) since June 2020. Mazelle currently conducts research for the Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Weekly Update.

Mazelle is also a Teaching Assistant for Professor Jim Baker's National Security Law seminar and co-Director of Social Good for the Harvard Association of Law and Business; she is also on the board of the Disability Law Student Association. She has worked as a Teaching Fellow for three General Education courses at Harvard College, including Ambassador Samantha Power and Professor Cass Sunstein's course on behavioral science and social change. Prior to law school, Mazelle co-founded Fenix Humanitarian Legal Aid, an NGO that provides legal aid and protection services to asylum seekers on the Greek island of Lesvos and managed the Human Rights Investigations Clinic at the University of Hong Kong, in conjunction with Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps. She spent part of this summer conducting archival interviews of Syrian-Armenians in Beirut, Lebanon with Rerooted Archive, in partnership with the IIIM on Syria. Mazelle has a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, and studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Mansfield College, Oxford. She speaks Farsi.

Mazelle is now an HLS PILAC alum. Biography last updated: October 2021.