Ellen Lawton, JD, is Executive Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children at Boston Medical Center.  She has served as MLPC’s Executive Director since 2001; prior to that, she was a staff attorney responsible for a federally funded Welfare-to-Work advocacy project at BMC.   Ms. Lawton has expertise in poverty law generally, and in the area of family law and interpersonal violence. Ms. Lawton is nationally recognized for her leadership in developing the medical-legal partnership model, and has published an array of articles describing this work in both clinical and legal journals.  She was a 2004 Harvard Law School Wasserstein Fellow.