The Bettina E. Pruckmayr Memorial Award is presented each year to a graduating Georgetown Law student who has demonstrated a commitment to international human rights work.

The award honors Bettina Pruckmayr, a 1994 Law Center graduate who was dedicated to advancing human rights and the public interest. During her time at Georgetown Law, Bettina co-founded the German American Law Students Association and served as the chairperson of the Georgetown Law chapter of Amnesty International. After graduation, Bettina served as director of the World Federalist Association’s International Criminal Court project. Bettina’s life was tragically cut short when she was killed in December 1995 during a violent mugging that took place near her home in Washington, D.C.

“Bettina had an inner spark that energized everyone around her,” says Professor Elisa Massimino, Executive Director of the Human Rights Institute. “She was brimming with creative ideas for how to make human rights real in people’s lives. Her example continues to inspire our community.”

Based on nominations from faculty, staff, and fellow students, the Human Rights Institute will select one graduating J.D. or LL.M. student who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to human rights work to receive this award. A call for nominations goes out to the campus community every spring. The award winner receives $2,000 through a gift fund established by the Pruckmayr family.

2026 Award Winner — Siona Sharma

The Human Rights Institute is delighted to announce that Siona Sharma is the recipient of the 2026 Bettina E. Pruckmayr Memorial Award. The award is named in honor of a Georgetown Law alumna whose life and work exemplified the principle that the law must serve justice. Siona’s unwavering dedication to advancing human rights in a wide variety of areas—especially in public health—has already been making a difference, opening up pathways to ensure that all people can enjoy the human right to health.

Siona’s undergraduate experience shaped laid the foundation for her commitment to community-based health policy. While studying at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, Siona founded Starts with Soap, an organization that engaged hundreds of student volunteers to improve girls’ education outcomes and health literacy in underserved schools.  After earning a B.S. in Science, Technology, and International Affairs with a focus on Global Health, Siona joined McKinsey & Company where she helped design more equitable health systems and supported maternal and neonatal health programs in Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia. These experiences gave Siona a firsthand understanding of how legal frameworks and institutional decisions determine whether a mother in Nairobi receives prenatal care or a community in Rwanda can access life-saving medicine.

At Georgetown Law, Siona focused on human rights advocacy, rights-based litigation, and global health policy. As a student in HRI’s Human Rights Advocacy in Action Practicum, Siona and her team developed legal and advocacy strategies to secure restitution for Haiti from financial and other institutions who profited from the exploitation of the young state after it won its independence from France. In the Appellate Litigation Clinic, Siona argued before the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on behalf of a client to reopen his immigration case, based on his status as a survivor of domestic violence under the Violence Against Women Act. For the past two years, Siona worked with the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, where she wrote about the right to health during public health emergencies, worked with lawyers challenging the closure of USAID, and published a piece about the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO).

During her 1L summer, through Georgetown’s International Internship Program, Siona traveled to Malawi with the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC), where she documented access to healthcare for incarcerated people and led focus group research aimed at expanding empowerment and reducing arbitrary arrests for sex workers and women living with HIV. She also contributed to a published compendium of human rights cases in Africa, a resource designed to assist high court justices across the continent. The following year, she worked with the Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN) in Nairobi, facilitating engagement by Kenyan civil society actors in the country’s Universal Periodic Review by the UN’s Human Rights Council. She has also provided legal support to the WHO and the One Health High-Level Expert Panel in Geneva, and she has volunteered with a humanitarian organization delivering medical equipment and solar infrastructure to hospitals in Syria, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

After graduation, Siona will be working with SALC in Nairobi, continuing her focus on the intersection of global health strategy, legal advocacy, and institutional accountability. Through fieldwork, policy advocacy, and litigation across East and Southern Africa and beyond, Siona will seek to ensure that the legal infrastructure supporting vulnerable populations does not fracture under the weight of political shifts or funding crises.