Team
Principal Investigators
Geoff Dancy
Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science, University of Toronto
Geoff Dancy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Toronto. A former director of the Transitional Justice Research Collaborative (TJRC), he has over 15 years of experience collecting and analyzing data on transitional justice. A native of Louisiana, Dancy made an unexpected turn toward human rights research after taking a trip in 2003 to observe criminal proceedings at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2003. He has since interned at the International Center for Transitional Justice and conducted field research in Northern Ireland, Israel, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Colombia. His work on human rights law and the impact of the anti-impunity institutions like the International Criminal Court, domestic human rights prosecutions and truth commissions has been published in a variety of outlets, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of International Law, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and Comparative Political Studies. Dancy holds an M.A. in International Studies from the University of North Texas and a Ph.D in International Relations from the University of Minnesota.
Phuong Pham
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School and T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Phuong Pham, Ph.D., MPH, is a co-founder of KoboToolbox and Peacebuilding.org, an Associate Professor at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of Evaluation and Implementation Science at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). She has over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing epidemiologic and evaluation research, technology solutions, and educational programs in ongoing and post-conflict countries such as northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Iraq, Cambodia, Colombia and other areas affected by mass violence and humanitarian crisis. As part of this work, she has pioneered the use of perception surveys to assess the views and opinions of war-affected populations toward accountability and conflict resolution.
Kathryn Sikkink
Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Kathryn Sikkink, Ph.D., is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Law School and Government Department. Sikkink works on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, and transitional justice. Her publications include International Norms, Moral Psychology, and Neuroscience (2021); The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (2020); Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (2017); The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (2011; awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award, and the WOLA/Duke University Award); Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (2004); Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998; co-authored with Margaret Keck and awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations); and The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance, (2013; co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp). Sikkink holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Patrick Vinck
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School & T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Patrick Vinck, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health and in the Department of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He is also the Research Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He leads a team conducting research on resilience, peacebuilding, and social cohesion in contexts of mass violence, conflicts and natural disasters, with support from the Mac Arthur Foundation, UNDP and UNICEF among others. He is the cofounder and director of KoBoToolbox, a digital data collection platform, and the Data-Pop Alliance, a Big Data partnership with MIT and ODI. Dr. Vinck served on the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) form 2010 to 2017. He serves as a regular advisor and evaluation consultant to the United Nations and other agencies. He graduated as an engineer in applied biological sciences from Gembloux Agricultural University (Belgium), and holds a Ph.D. in International Development from Tulane University.
Research Directors
Helen Clapp
Research Coordinator, Carr Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
In her capacity as Research Coordinator, Helen Clapp plans meetings and conferences and helps keep the Transitional Justice Evaluation Team on track to meet its grant deliverables. She also contributes to the team’s research, including on reparations policies and gender and transitional justice. She previously worked as a paralegal at Foley Hoag LLP in a variety of practice areas, including Global Business & Human Rights. She holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a BA from Amherst College in Arabic and International Relations.
Sarah Guggemos
Project Director, Tulane University
Sarah Guggemos worked as the Project Director of the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools Project (TJET) at Tulane University from June 2021-September 2022. In this role, she managed all of the research assistants and supported the principal investigators by coordinating data management and overseeing communication between team members. Sarah's interest in human rights scholarship formed while she studied abroad at Leiden University College in 2019. While living in The Hague, she had the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary studies focusing on international justice, world politics, and human diversity. She earned her B.A. in English Literature and Political Science from Tulane in May of 2021. In July of 2023 she received an MSt in English with a concentration in American Studies from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation focused on how a growing cohort of contemporary African American authors are returning to a specific form of life writing to make political calls for the abolition of racialized incarceration in the United States. Sarah currently works in London as a Junior Consultant at Taylor Jones Partnership, a global recruitment agency.
Oskar Timo Thoms
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto Mississauga
Oskar Timo Thoms, Ph.D., is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Toronto at Mississauga. Previously, he worked as a research and statistical consultant. In 2019-20 and 2022, he was an instructor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa. During 2018-19, he was the Simons Research Fellow in International Law and Human Security and an instructor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He earned his Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University (2017), with a focus on international relations and quantitative methods, and completed an M.A. in Sociology at McGill University (2005). Prior to the Ph.D., he was a Research Associate at the McGill Research Group in Conflict and Human Rights (2005-06) and at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for International Policy Studies (2008-09), and worked as a consultant on policy research supported by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada). His research and teaching has focused on human rights and transitional justice, and he is co-author of the final report of the Lancet Commission on Peaceful Societies through Health and Gender Equality, and of articles in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Peace Research, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Human Rights Quarterly, and Conflict & Health. Timo cleaned and integrated all TJET data collections into one database, worked on analyses and the human rights accountability indices, and created the TJET website.
Consulting Faculty
Dara Cohen
Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Dara Kay Cohen is a political scientist and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests include the causes and consequences of civil war, gender and political violence, and qualitative and mixed research methods. Cohen’s first book, Rape During Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines the variation in the use of rape during recent civil conflicts; the research for the book draws on extensive fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and El Salvador. The book received several awards, including the 2017 Theodore J. Lowi Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the best first book in the political science discipline. Cohen also co-founded and co-directs the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) data project, a publicly available dataset tracking reports of different forms of sexual violence during wartime. The SVAC dataset received the 2023 J. David Singer Data Innovation Award from the Conflict Processes Section of APSA. Cohen’s next project will focus on the intersection of contentious politics, political violence, and abortion rights in the contemporary U.S.. Cohen received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and an A.B. in political science and philosophy from Brown University.
Fellows
Daniel Marín-López
Transitional Justice Fellow, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Daniel Marín-López is a lecturer on “Business, Development and Human Rights” at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and on “Critical Studies of Human Rights” at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). As an expert advisor on corporate complicity at the Colombian Truth Commission, he contributed to the collective work of researchers to establish extrajudicial responsibilities of economic actors in grave human rights violations committed during the internal armed conflict. His most recent publication is “Economic Actors, State-Building, and Transitional Justice: Critical Comments from Colombia” (Idées d’Ameriques—IdeAs Journal 2022) with Juan Vera. He previously worked at Dejusticia, a Colombia-based human rights research and advocacy organization dedicated to the promotion of social justice in the Global South, where he focused on issues of transitional justice, the Colombian armed conflict, and business and human rights. Marín- López studied Political Science (B.A.) and Law (LL.B.) at Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and was an International Human Rights Fellow at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, where he studied a LL.M (honors).
Tadesse Metekia
Visiting Fellow, Harvard Medical School & T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Tadesse Metekia is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, Addis Ababa and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. His expertise includes transitional justice, transnational organized crimes, and international criminal law. Previously, he taught comparative and international criminal law at Jimma University, Ethiopia. He has also served as a prosecution consultant for the USDOJ and the Netherlands Openbaar Ministerie. Simie Metekia has a Ph.D., cum laude, in international crimes and justice from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has published a book, book chapters and articles on transitional justice and criminal accountability for gross human rights violations, focusing mainly on the Ethiopian legal system and international standards.
Sri (Ayu) Wahyuningroem
Carr Center Fellow, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Ayu Wahyuningroem is an Associate Professor at Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta and Director of the University's Center for Citizenship and Human Rights Studies (CCHRS). She has been teaching political science since 2001 and has been taking part in social movements in Indonesia since she was involved in student activism in the late 1990s. She works closely with civil society, including communities of human rights victims, and does consultancy with national and international governments as well as non-government organizations including the United Nations and International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She completed her Ph.D. at the Australian National University as an awardee of the Australian Leadership Award, a Master of Art in Political Theory from Central European University, Hungary, and a Bachelor of Political Science from Universitas Indonesia. She took her postdoc at St Antony's College, Oxford University, and was a specially appointed associate professor at Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), Osaka University. Her research and expertise have been on transitional justice, memory politics, human rights, democracy, political theory, gender, and peace studies. She published a book titled "Transitional Justice from State to Society: Democratization in Indonesia" (2020), and recently co-edited a book on "Resisting Indonesia's Culture of Impunity: Aceh's Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (2023). Ayu started her fellowship at Carr Center as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and continues her involvement in a project on transitional justice and state accountability led by Professor Kathryn Sikkink.
Postdoctoral & Doctoral Fellows
Thomas O’Mealia
Postdoctoral Fellow, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Tom O’Mealia is an Asia Pacific Analyst at the Office of Opinion Research in Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States Department of State. Before joining the State Department, he was a postdoctoral research fellow with the TJET team at Harvard University, based at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the TH Chan School of Public Health. His academic research combines fieldwork and statistics to explain the political economy of violence, accountability processes after conflict, and the causes and consequences of displacement. Tom received his BA, MA, and PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.
Averell Schmidt
Doctoral Research Fellow, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Averell (Avery) Schmidt is a Ph.D. candidate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research examines the strategic interaction of states as they negotiate the terms of international cooperation. He is particularly interested in how the contestation of international laws, norms, and institutions shapes the prospects of interstate cooperation. His research is published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and Foreign Affairs. He is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and an affiliate of the Institute of Quantitative Social Science. Previously, he has been a research fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a graduate student associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he received a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, served with the Peace Corps in Morocco, fought forest fires in the Sawtooth National Forest, and worked for public policy research organizations in Sri Lanka, Israel, Georgia, and Egypt.
Christopher Shay
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
Christopher Wiley Shay is a postdoctoral research fellow at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University. He studies transitional justice - especially prosecutions and war crimes trials - and whether these policy instruments can bolster democratization and the rule of law. This topic fits neatly into a broader research agenda that addresses armed insurgencies, civil resistance movements, and their long-term effects on societies and governments. Shay's work draws on a diverse array of quantitative and field-based methodologies, and has been published by the Journal of Global Security Studies, the Journal of Peace Research, the Washington Post, Political Violence at a Glance, and other venues. In the past, Shay managed the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO 2.1) data project for Dr. Erica Chenoweth and helped to update the Socio-Economic Rights Fulfillment Index for Dr. Susan Randolph. He has also provided analysis on India's long-running Maoist insurgency (the "Naxalites") to the International Institute of Strategic Studies and has conducted fieldwork in Nepal. He received his Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School and a master's degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University. Prior to his graduate studies, Shay was an outdoor educator and (for brief periods) a wildland firefighter. He holds a bachelor's degree from Hanover College.
Affiliated Researchers
Luciana Vosniak
Program & Research Manager, Peace and Human Rights Data Program, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Luciana Vosniak is a Brazilian-American humanitarian professional with experience in international public law, humanitarian affairs, and human rights. Her work and research focus on issues such as transitional justice, accountability for war crimes, and protection of civilians. She holds a Master of Liberal Arts in International Relations from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Laws from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná in Brazil. She is currently the Program and Research Manager for the Peace and Human Rights Data Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she oversees research projects and data collection efforts around the world. Previously, she served as the Program Coordinator for HHI's Executive Negotiation Program, managing training programs for humanitarian leaders on humanitarian negotiations. In addition to her work at HHI, Luciana has held positions with several prominent organizations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and with the International Peace Institute in New York. Luciana is the Chair of the Sustainable Development Committee at the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area and serves as an advanced-level certified International Humanitarian Law instructor for the American Red Cross.
Mykhailo Soldatenko
Visiting Researcher, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Mykhailo Soldatenko is a visiting researcher on international agreements at Harvard Law School and a transitional justice researcher at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Soldatenko is also an attorney at law in Ukraine and New York and a Ph.D. candidate in public international law at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He was previously a senior associate at the Asters law firm in Kyiv, where he practiced international dispute resolution.
Research Assistants
Harvard University
Judith Abitan (2024)
Judith Abitan is an international human rights advocate and the executive director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. She has been at the forefront of some of the most pressing human rights issues of our time, immersed in the pursuit of justice internationally, the promotion and protection of human rights, and the betterment of the human condition. She has made representations to international bodies and governments in relation to the rescue and resettlement of some of the most vulnerable and at-risk populations, political prisoner cases, and asylum seeker applications. Judith holds a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University; a Bachelor of Civil Law from the Université de Montréal; a Master of Laws from Fordham University School of Law (graduate fellow editor of the Fordham International Law Journal); and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (John F. Kennedy fellow). She is a 2024-2025 fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a practitioner fellow of Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs’ Scholars Program.
Laura Brisbane (2022-23)
Laura Brisbane is an Australian international lawyer and diplomat specializing in multilateral organizations and global peace and security issues. From 2012-15, she served overseas in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she worked on peace and security issues with the African Union. In 2019-20, she was seconded to NATO as a civilian policy advisor at the Resolute Support Mission in Kabul, Afghanistan, supporting NATO’s engagement on the Afghan peace process. Most recently, Laura worked on human rights and gender issues at Australia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. She also has extensive experience working on regional and maritime security challenges in the Indo-Pacific, including the South China Sea in Canberra-based roles. Laura has a Bachelor of Arts/Laws from the University of Newcastle and a Master of International Security Law from ANU. She just completed a mid-career Master in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School as an RG Menzies scholar and Mallinckrodt Fellow.
Indu Pandey (2022)
Indu Pandey graduated from Harvard in 2022 magna cum laude with highest honors in Government and a secondary in Economics. While in school, she wrote her thesis on reparations for gender-based violence in Latin America. After helping to design TJET’s coding scheme for reparations programs, she worked at Planned Parenthood doing advocacy work. She is now a student at Yale Law School, hoping to focus on reproductive rights.
Jessica Sun (2024)
Jessica Sun is a Master in Public Policy (MPP) student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to graduate school, she was a program manager for PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) team, where she led advocacy and network-building activities and assisted at-risk artists and human rights defenders globally. Her work on responding to the 2021 Afghanistan crisis and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as advocating for cultural rights defenders at the UN, was featured in a 2023 UNESCO report. She has previously conducted research on human rights, particularly on post-dictatorship transitional justice and collective memory in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. She holds an honors B.A. in political science from CUNY Hunter College and CUNY Macaulay Honors College, with a certificate in public policy and minors in human rights and international relations. She was a 2022-2023 Community Fellow with the Institute for Nonprofit Practice, a PPIA U.C. Berkeley JSI Fellow, and a Fulbright semi-finalist.
Sravya Tadepalli (2022-23)
Sravya Tadepalli is a research assistant with TJET and a Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Originally from Oregon, she is a board member of Hindus for Human Rights, where she has organized state and national advocacy efforts to combat Hindu nationalism and caste discrimination. She has written about human and civil rights issues for several publications, including The Nation, The Washington Post, and Prism Reports. Sravya is also a 2018 Truman Scholar.
Jessica Untz Lee (2022-23)
Jessica Untz Lee is a British physician who focusses on improving care delivery to those who have experienced violence, and strengthening the interface between the health, social and legal systems. She has a broad background in paediatric, psychiatric, and sexual health. Prior to her medical career, she worked in Latin America in a variety of community and coordination roles. She speaks English and Spanish, and is a proponent of survivor-led, trauma-informed practice.
Tulane University
Rachel Adenan (2022)
Rachel Adenan graduated from Tulane University in May 2023 with a B.A. in International Development. For TJET, Rachel contributed to prosecution research in a number of countries, including Ukraine. Following graduation from Tulane, she accepted a position as a Corps Member at Teach For America in Washington, DC and is now working at DC Public Schools as a middle school teacher.
Rachel Corley (2021-22)
Rachel Corley graduated from Tulane University in May 2023 with a B.A. in Political Science-International Development and minors in Spanish and Economics. A core member of the TJET Tulane team, Rachel contributed to new prosecution research, particularly for African cases, and she auditing work done by other coders. In additional to TJET, Rachel has also worked for a non-profit working to combat food insecurity in New Orleans and for an organization focused on local-level development projects in Ecuador.
Sofia Costantino (2021-22)
Sofia Costantino is a first-generation college student who graduated cum laude from Tulane University with a dual degree in Psychology and Sociology. For TJET, she worked as a prosecution researcher with a specific focus on Francophone countries, given her fluency in French. Sofia now lives in New York city and works as a paralegal at Ernst Young.
Benjamin Dunbar (2021-22)
Benjamin Dunbar is a doctoral candidate at Tulane University whose research focuses on the politics of the Post-Soviet Space. His dissertation focuses on the emergence of Ukrainian national identity. He is also a Project Management Analyst for Abt Associates working on USAID-funded Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS), which helps countries around the world transition to sustainable, self-financed health systems as a means to support access to universal healthcare and improve population health and well-being. For TJET, Ben contributed to prosecution research in Russia and other post-Soviet states.
Abigail Farho (2022)
Abigail Farho is a native of Baton Rouge, LA who earned a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish from Tulane University in 2022. She was a very accomplished prosecution researcher for TJET, documenting and error-correcting hundreds of cases across Latin America. Abigail is now studying at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she will graduate with a J.D. in 2025.
Sofia Gomez Alonso (2021-22)
Sofia Gomez grew up in Bogota, Colombia amid the peace process that aimed to end decades of civil war. She graduated with Bachelor's Degrees in Political Science and Communications from Tulane in 2023. One of the first members of the Tulane TJET team, Sofia worked to update the project’s source information using US State Department human rights reports, and she contributed to prosecution research on Latin America. She is now working in advertising for Georges Media publications in New Orleans.
Catherine Grayson (2018-21)
Catherine Grayson is a Massachusetts native who graduated from Tulane Univesrity with a B.A. in International Development and Economics and minor in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship. Catherine’s research on violence against women in post-conflict settings informed early TJET efforts to collect information on gender-attentive prosecutions. While at Tulane, Catherine also led disaster relief trips, and she worked for Flux Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, where she collected and analyzed data to create reports on various social program operations, outcomes and impacts.
Kaila Kheirolomoom (2021-22)
Kaila Kheirolomoom is a proud graduate of Tulane University, where her research primarily focused on conflict, the Middle East, and international law. For TJET, she performed prosecution research on micro-states that are often overlooked in the field. Kaila is currently a Program Analyst at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Energy and Materials. Prior to this, she worked on foreign aid programs in Yemen at the US Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which inspired her interest in energy security.
Isabel (Rowan) Scarpino (2021)
Rowan Scarpino is an aspiring human rights defender particularly interested in restorative justice and the justiciability of economic, social, and cultural rights. She was instrumental in compiling narratives and data for TJET's Truth Commissions dataset. At Tulane University, she studied International Relations and Philosophy, using the TJET Trials dataset to write her senior thesis, which examined how press and internet censorship impacts the quantity and success of human rights trials by impeding evidence collection. Upon graduating, she continues previous research on peace negotiations and possible future transitional justice in Venezuela.
Christopher Shelton (2021-22)
Chris Shelton graduated from Tulane University with a B.A. in Political Science, with an emphasis in International Relations, Spanish, and Portuguese. He prosecution research on Portuguese speaking countries was critical. Chris is currently working for Qualtrics as a Product Specialist, training a new team of Product Specialists in Mexico City. When not in Mexico, he lives in Utah where he enjoys hiking and skiing.
Meagan Shinker (2021-22)
Meagan Shinker graduated from Tulane University in 2022 with a B.A. in Sociology and Social Policy & Practice. Shortly after enrolling in Dr. Geoff Dancy's International Law course at Tulane University, Meagan began working as a Research Assistant for TJET focusing on researching prosecutions of human rights violations in Southeast Asian countries. Later, as a senior coder, she tackled more complex international and hybrid prosecutions for crimes committed in the Balkans region of Europe. Meagan's experience working on the TJET project fueled her passion for human rights, and she currently works as a paralegal for a national civil rights and public interest law firm in Chicago.
Kate Springs (2021-22)
Kate Springs, from Dallas, Texas, is a senior at Tulane University pursuing degrees in History and International Development. Her interests lie in humanitarian work and peace studies, and she has completed field work and research on these subjects in Latin America and the Middle East. Kate was one of the initial members of the TJET coding team, and she did a lot of work to update country sourcebooks for prosecution coding. She is currently an intern with the Policy & Advocacy team at Mercy Corps, working to promote U.S. policies that advance humanitarian and development priorities. After completing her internship, she will be heading to Nepal to study gender and development in the Himalayas.
University of Toronto, Mississauga campus
Fatimah Ahsan (2022-23)
Fatimah Ahsan is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto with a passion for law, international relations and human rights. An avid reader and involved citizen, she is currently studying Political Science and planning on attending law school after graduation. Her work on TJET included truth commission and amnesty database management, which was crucial to the completion of these projects. Her hobbies include reading, cooking, and deep diving into random Wikipedia articles.
Pedro Andrade (2022-23)
Pedro Andrade is a native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who is currently pursuing a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Toronto. As a research assistant, Pedro was responsible for updating prosecution events data across the globe, mostly notably in Brazil and The Philippines. Pedro has demonstrated a strong commitment and passion to understand human rights and democratic transitions internationally. Outside of academia, Pedro enjoys the study of languages, following sports and traveling.
Nicole Fernando (2023)
Nicole Fernando is a student at the University of Toronto currently pursuing a double major in political science and biology, with a minor in law, ethics and society. For TJET, Nicole worked diligently to update information on accused individuals and in all prosecutions in the database. In Mississauga, Ontario, Nicole engages in community outreach and public programs through the library system, and plan on pursuing a career in the study of law and policy.
Ziad Harmanani (2023)
Ziad Harmanani graduated from University of Toronto in 2023 with a B.A. in Communications and a double minor in Italian and Cinema studies. As a research assistant with TJET, Ziad worked tirelessly to document the hundreds of human rights prosecutions that have taken place in Chile. Ziad also designed a template for TJET infographics.
Mary Kazek (2022-23)
Mary Kazak graduated from is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto with a degree in International Affairs and Economics. Her interest in global governance, comparative foreign policy, and international law led her to become a research assistant with the TJET project. For the past year, she has worked extensively on criminal prosecutions in Chile for crimes committed during the Pinochet regime and will be writing about her findings and observations. Mary also was also assigned difficult prosecutions to error-correct, and she vetted the amnesty database a final time before its publication. Outside of academia, you can find Mary backpacking across continents, mentoring students, or practicing her French.
Joseph Mangin (2022-23)
A native of France, Joseph Mangin is a student of Politics and International Relations at the University College London, who had opportunity to work on the TJET project during a year abroad studying at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Cherished for his light-hearted nature, Joseph’s work for TJET was primarily focused on updating data on amnesties in all countries of the world between 2010 and 2020.
Farah Radwan (2022-23)
Farah Radwan graduated in 2023 from University of Toronto with degrees in Political Science and Criminology, as well as a minor in Sociology. With TJET, she was responsible for researching and coding data that was related rape, sexual violence, and gender-based violence. Farah was also given the opportunity to work on inputting data on Chilean trials, as well as contributing to the final de-duplication and data cleaning process. Farah is now planning to pursue a graduate degree in Education.
University of Toronto, St. George campus
Nada Abdelaal (2022-23)
Nada Abdelaal graduated from the University of Toronto in 2023, with a dual degree in Political Science and Criminology. Nada’s interest in post-conflict societies inspired her to get involved with the TJET project, where she has gained invaluable experience and insight that will inform her future legal studies. She was responsible both for updating prosecutions data on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and for building a TJET resource library. She is planning to attend law school.
Halit Erdogan (2023)
Halit Erdogan is a University of Toronto student of political science and European affairs. His research interests are human rights, migration politics, and digital privacy concerns. Through his work, Halit aims to illuminates the complexities of global policies, highlighting their impact on marginalized communities. For TJET, Halit was mainly responsible for helping to build a resource library.
Annabelle MacRae (2023)
Annabelle MacRae recently graduated with a M.A. from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She previously attended the University of Calgary where she attained her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Science and Global Development. While working write scores of country profiles for the TJET website, Annabelle also served as a research assistant on the Elite Africa Project under Dr. Antoinette Handley. Her research interests include human rights law, international law, and Indigenous affairs in Canada.
Javahir Saidov (2022-23)
Javahir Saidov is a native of Uzbekistan who graduated from the University of Toronto in 2023 with a B.A. in Political Science and History. His passion for social justice led him to specialize in transitional justice research. Javahir is committed to studying and unraveling the complexities of post-conflict societies and advocating for effective mechanisms to promote accountability, reconciliation and healing. For TJET, he worked on updating prosecution information in Russia and other post-Soviet states, and he contributing to the TJET resource database.