Alexa Koenig

Alexa Koenig, Ph.D., J.D., is the executive director of the Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions) and a lecturer-in-residence at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches classes on human rights and international criminal law. Her research and commentary have appeared in such diverse outlets as the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Huffington Post, and US News and World Reports. She is an author, with Victor Peskin and Eric Stover, of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror (UC Press 2016); the editor, with Keramet Reiter, of Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement (Palgrave MacMillan 2015); and a contributor to The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices (UC Press 2009). Prior to her appointment at Berkeley Law, she served as program manager of the Witness to Guantánamo Project. She is currently a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and is often called upon to speak about the role of emerging technologies in human rights practice. Koenig has won numerous honors and awards for her research, including a fellowship with the American Association of University Women and grants from the National Science Foundation. She earned her Ph.D. with honors or high honors in all classes from UC Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, her J.D. magna cum laude with a certificate in intellectual property and cyberlaw from the University of San Francisco, and her B.A. summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles.