Keynote Speaker - Ciara O'Connell, PhD

(Principal Officer, Criminal Policy, Ireland Department of Justice | Global Honors ‘09)

Dr. O'Connell 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).

O'Connell 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.