Ava Azad is the Executive Director of AvAz LLC, an environmental and animal law and consulting firm based in Kansas.
After learning in a high school biology class of the myriad ways that human activities have led to contamination and degradation of air, land, and water, Ava felt a weight of responsibility on behalf of humanity to remediate and protect the environment for our planetary co-inhabitants. To undertake this challenge, Ava completed an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies (and Spanish) at the University of Kansas (KU). She continued on to earn her Juris Doctor, with an Environmental and Natural Resources Law Certificate, from KU to harness the power of the law to make positive change.
After law school, Ava began an eight-year tenure as an enforcement attorney at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, where she most recently served as Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Managing Attorney. Ava administered the agency’s environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act; Clean Water Act; Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act; Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; Resource Conservation and Recovery Act; Safe Drinking Water Act; and Toxic Substances Control Act. Ava also contributed to drafting many of the agency’s PFAS regulations, policies, guidance documents, and enforcement orders and agreements. This included actions to address PFAS and other contaminants at and around military installations and other federal facilities.
In 2024, Ava founded AvAz LLC to expand her legal practice to include animal law, with a focus on animals used in research. She looks forward to applying the advanced legal and policy expertise she gains through the Animal Law LLM at Lewis & Clark to drive concrete reforms that replace animal testing with validated non-animal methods. Combined with her years of experience in federal regulation, enforcement, and policy development, Ava will leverage the LLM program’s specialized coursework and mentorship from leading scholars to advocate for legislative and regulatory measures that make alternatives to animal testing the legal default.
Ava is a member of the New York and Kansas bars.