Hannah

Whitten

Hannah Whitten was born and raised in Oklahoma City. In 2019, she received a bachelor's in Journalism with a minor in Entrepreneurship from the University of Oklahoma. Hannah earned her Juris Doctorate from the University of Oklahoma College of Law in 2022. During law school, Hannah made appearances on the Dean's Honor Roll and was a member of the Organization for the Advancement of Women in the Law. After graduating law school, Hannah passed the recently established Uniform Bar Exam. Currently, Hannah is a member of the Oklahoma Bar Association and is licensed in the Northern and Western Federal District Courts of Oklahoma.

While in law school, Hannah greatly enjoyed working at the OU Legal Clinic for three semesters, serving indigent clients who could not afford an attorney. Hannah worked as a civil legal intern with a deck of pro bono clients and was also appointed a Guardian Ad Litem for a sensitive child custody matter. In her last semester at the OU Legal Clinic, Hannah was hired as the civil research assistant and aided in training the new legal interns.

Hannah became heavily involved in epilepsy non-profit work after her brother, Dylan, passed away in 2017. Her work in epilepsy began as a board member for the Isaiah Stone Foundation, which aids local families struggling with epilepsy and supports epilepsy research. Hannah is also the youngest board member for CURE Epilepsy, the largest private funder of research for a cure for epilepsy. She also sits on Partners Against Mortality in Epilepsy's (PAME) governance committee, where she assists in planning and executing the yearly PAME conference in which PAME brings the best epilepsy research of the year to be presented by the researchers to patients and families. Hannah was recently awarded the NextGen 30 under 30 award for her work in epilepsy.

Hannah recently presented the extended trailer of a documentary, “The Curse of Stigma,” as one of the executive producers at the 35th International Epilepsy Congress in Dublin, Ireland. “The Curse of Stigma” tells the story of African women living with epilepsy and the pain, isolation, and harm they have suffered because of discrimination and deeply embedded cultural beliefs. All funds raised through this effort will go directly to the International Bureau for Epilepsy’s Africa Anti-Stigma Campaign. Hannah is passionate about epilepsy research, advocacy, and stigma work nationally and globally.

Even before Dylan passed away from SUDEP, Hannah was very involved with nonprofit work. She has traveled to Africa on numerous occasions for her family's nonprofit, Sewing Hope, which aims to support underprivileged women and children in Uganda. Her family has created numerous nonprofits to honor the memory of Dylan and an older brother, Brandon, who passed away 15 years earlier due to addiction. She has a love for service, but epilepsy has a special place in her heart, and she plans on being involved in the fight against epilepsy for the rest of her life. In her free time, Hannah enjoys reading science fiction and gardening.