Lorena Avila Jaimes

2017-2010 Interdisciplinary Research Week Team

Lorena Avila Jaimes is a doctoral candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. She has a B.A. in political science with a master’s degree in public policy from Universidad National de Colombia. She holds an LLM in international law and human rights and an MSc in victimology and criminal justice from Tilburg University in The Netherlands. She has connected her scholarship to her policy work as Project Manager of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme for Latin America, the Toledo International Centre for Peace-CITpax, and as a consultant for non-profit and government agencies. She has taught at Universidad de los Andes, Universidad del Rosario, Rutgers University, among others. Her interdisciplinary framework links (internal and international) migration dynamics to social justice issues (e.g., armed conflict, social and racial inequality, criminalization of immigrants). Lorena joined the Latin American Interdisciplinary Research Team in 2018 to access VHA testimonies. It was the basis for completing a comparative study with Yael Siman and Nancy Nicholls about the trajectories and survival networks of Holocaust survivors arriving in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico; it is available as a chapter in the 2021 Edition of the Lessons and Legacies edited volume.