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Keynote Speaker - Ciara O'Connell, PhD (UWT, Global Honors Program, Class of 2009)

Ciara is an expert in international human rights law, with degrees from the University of Sussex, UK (PhD, 2017), the Irish Centre for Human Rights (LLM, 2010) and University of Washington-Tacoma (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences - Global Honors, with a Minor in Human Rights, 2009).

Ciara has held numerous academic positions, including at the Centre for Human Rights in South Africa (University of Pretoria) and Australian National University, and she is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin Ireland. She has published widely on a variety of human rights-related areas, such as deprivation of liberty and gender and human rights, and has carried out field research in countries across Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Ciara is a Senior Official in the Department of Justice in Ireland. She works in the area of criminal policy, and holds responsibility for implementing European Union law at the national level. Prior to this, Ciara was a Senior Inspector with the Office of Inspector of Prisons in Ireland, where she developed and implemented a human rights-based programme of inspections of prisons; this included the creation of a first-of-its kind digital survey to collect real-time data from people in prison and prison staff, and an innovative online recommendations monitoring database.