Rangita de Silva de Alwis

Dr. Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a globally recognized leader on international women’s human rights, is faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she also teaches at the Wharton School of Business. She was elected as an expert to the treaty body on the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and is the Focal Point on Women, Peace and Security.

Rangita is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Distinguished Fellow on Global Gender Equity at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the Senior Fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. In the 2022–2023 academic year, she was a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she also served as Leader in Practice at the Women and Public Policy Program (2019–2021). In the Hilary term of 2024, she will be a Research Visitor at Oxford University. Before Penn Law, Rangita led the Women in Public Service Project founded by Secretary Clinton.

Rangita has published widely on some of the most critical global challenges to women’s leadership and gender equality in leading US law journals. She received her LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School, where she was recognized as a “Woman of Inspiration” in 2015.