Johanna Chao Kreilick

Senior Fellow at the Center

Johanna brings over 20 years of experience launching, leading, and transforming organizations and initiatives dedicated to the public good and a healthy planet. She champions this work alongside a broad network of partners and change-makers, and draws on her expertise as a trained mediator, facilitator, and nonprofit board member.

In addition to advising global nonprofits on organizational growth, strategic change, and key collaborations, she works with leaders and philanthropists at critical inflection points. Her services include strategic advice, assessment, governance, partnerships, fundraising, and facilitation. Recent partners include the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program and the Future of Rights & Governance (FORGE) Program at New York University School of Law, SPUN.EARTH, Project CETI, and more.

Johanna also served as the President and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists from 2020 to 2023 where she led a major organizational transformation and 5-year strategy refresh, integrating equity with science and driving significant policy wins in climate, clean energy, and food justice.

Her career began as a community organizer advocating alongside smallholder farmers, workers, and vendors globally. She holds a BA with distinction in Anthropology from Stanford University and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Yoyo Wong
Executive Assistant

S. Priya Morley
Project Advisor, Global Justice Clinic; Director, Racial Justice Initiative, Bernstein Institute for Human Rights

Global Justice Clinic

Before joining the Bernstein Institute, Priya was on the faculty at UCLA Law as Director of the International Human Rights Clinic and Racial Justice Policy Counsel at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she led academic, advocacy, and policy initiatives at the intersection of racial justice and critical approaches to human rights. She was affiliated with the Critical Race Studies and International and Comparative Law Programs at UCLA Law, as well as the UCLA Latin American Institute.

Priya was previously an Arthur Helton Global Human Rights Fellow at NYU Law, researching discrimination against Black African and Haitian migrant women in Mexico, and she supervised students in the Global Justice Clinic’s Caribbean Climate Justice Initiative, with which she continued to collaborate while at UCLA Law.

A Canadian attorney, Priya previously worked in employment law, public law, and human rights litigation at WeirFoulds LLP and clerked at the Divisional Court, Superior Court of Justice of Ontario. She also worked with the UN Team of Experts on Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict and several civil society organizations, including the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Equality Effect, and Equitas International Centre for Human Rights Education.

Priya holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from NYU Law, law degrees from McGill University Faculty of Law, and a BA from the University of British Columbia. She is completing a PhD in Law at the Allard School of Law at UBC. Her research sits at the intersection of race, gender, and migration.

Emma Crowe
Research Scholar
The Earth Rights Research & Action

Sam Moon
Operations Manager

Prevention Project

Sam Moon (they/them) joined the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice in 2024 as the Operations Manager for the Prevention Project, where they oversee financial tracking, grants management, event planning, and communications.

Before joining the project, Sam gained diverse experience in education, teaching business fundamentals, accounting, and economics to high school students. They also held various operational roles, including Director of Operations for an animal rights nonprofit focused on investigations, legal advocacy, and food system transformation. Most recently, Sam serves as Managing Director of a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring sustainable access to food, water, and work.

Sam holds an MBA from Montclair State University, a Bachelor of Science in Management from Northeastern University, and a Nonprofit Management Certificate from a local community college.
In addition to their professional work, Sam serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors for a farmed animal sanctuary and aspires to study environmental and animal law through a social rights lens.

Youssef Farhat
Executive Director

Victoria Adelmant
Director, Digital Welfare State & Human Rights Project
Technology and Human Rights

Victoria Adelmant leads the Center’s work on technology and human rights as the Director of the Digital Welfare State and Human Rights Project. She is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU Law, where she teaches courses relating to emerging technologies and digitalization. 

Her research focuses on how the digital transformation of the state – particularly those parts of the state with which low-income and marginalized groups most interact, such as welfare services – impacts human rights. From the shifting of government services online, to digital ID, to financial technologies and biometrics, her research explores the exclusions which are arising as digital technologies are introduced into state services. She is currently co-authoring a book with Christiaan van Veen and Philip Alston on these topics.

Victoria previously worked for the International Human Rights program of the Oak Foundation and at Minority Rights Group International. She has long sought to combine her experience in international human rights organizations with work within grassroots organizations: she has worked with the United Nations, the European Commission and the Academy of European Law, and has advised asylum-seekers and migrants within service organizations in the United Kingdom and campaigned with Oxfam.

Victoria holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from NYU, where she was a Hauser Global Scholar and a Human Rights Scholar and won the Jerome Lipper Award and the David Moses Memorial Prize. She also holds an LLM from the London School of Economics (Distinction) and a BA in Law with German Law from the University of Oxford (First Class Honors).

Sienna Merope-Synge
Co-Director, Caribbean Climate Justice Initiative
Global Justice Clinic

Sienna Merope-Synge is the Co-Director of the Caribbean Climate Justice Initiative and the Director of the Indigenous Land Rights and Earth Defense project through the Global Justice Clinic. Both projects partner with communities and organizations on the frontlines of the climate crisis to defend their environmental, economic, social and cultural rights, and support efforts to secure land rights and build community power.

Sienna was previously the Legal Director at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), where she led the organization’s work seeking accountability for emblematic human and environmental rights violations in Haiti, including efforts to secure remedies for victims of the UN-introduced Haiti cholera epidemic and child support for victims of sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers. She worked between New York and Port-au-Prince from 2015 to 2020 and speaks fluent French and Haitian Creole.

Sienna received her LLM from NYU School of Law in 2015, where she was a Hauser global scholar. She holds political science and law degrees with first class honors from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Rob Lothman
Legal and Policy Director
Prevention Project

Rob Lothman is the Legal and Policy Director of the Prevention Project, where he orchestrates project strategy, research and program administration, cross-workstream initiatives, and development of the prevention framework. 

Prior to joining the Prevention Project, Rob worked in a range of legal, policy, teaching, and business contexts around the globe. As a Global Public Sector Marketing Manager with Cisco Systems, Rob led strategic marketing efforts for a multibillion-dollar global education portfolio, promoted CSR programs expanding access to education, and managed partnerships with governments, universities, and NGOs. At Shrewsbury School, Rob served as Peter J. Gomes Fellow, teaching English, history, philosophy, and social science research methods and developing course modules on transitional justice, human rights, and political repression. Rob also researched nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament at a Moscow-based NGO. 

Rob is a licensed attorney in Massachusetts, and he holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where he studied intersections between human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional law. Rob received his A.B. in Social Studies and a Minor in Russian from Harvard University, where he studied political repression and mass human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

Pablo de Greiff
Senior Fellow; Director
Prevention Project, Transitional Justice Program

Courses

Pablo de Greiff directs the Transitional Justice Program and the Prevention Project at the Center. He served as the first UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence from 2012 to 2018, as a member of the UN Independent Investigation on Burundi (UNIIB) in 2015-16, and since 2019 serves in the UN Secretary General’s Civilian Advisory Board.

From 2001 to 2014, Pablo was the Director of Research at the International Center for Transitional Justice. Born in Colombia, Pablo graduated from Yale University (BA) and from Northwestern University (PhD). Before joining the ICTJ, he was an associate professor with tenure in the Philosophy Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught ethics and political theory. He was also a Laurance S. Rockefeller fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University and held a concurrent fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Pablo is the editor or co-editor of ten books, including Jürgen Habermas’s The Inclusion of the Other (MIT Press, 1998), Global Justice and Transnational Politics (MIT Press, 2002), Las Razones de la Justicia: A Festschrift for Thomas McCarthy (México: UNAM, 2006), and in areas related to transitional justice, The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford, 2006), Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections (SSRC, 2009), and Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-combatants (SSRC, 2010), among others.

Pablo has published extensively on transitions to democracy, democratic theory, and the relationship between morality, politics, and law, and is on the board of editors of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and of several book series related to the topic.  His articles include “Theorizing Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice, NOMOS, vol. LI, Melissa Williams, Rosemary Nagy, and Jon Elster, eds. (NYU Press, 2012).

He has lectured at NYU, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, European University Institute, and in universities across Europe and Latin America.

Pablo contributed to the drafting of the final report of the Stockholm Initiative on DDR, authored the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict States: Reparations Programmes, and was an adviser to the World Bank on the process leading to the World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development. He has been an adviser to different transitional justice bodies in Peru, Guatemala, Morocco, Colombia, and the Philippines. He is the Chair of the Advisory Board of the Open Society’s Justice Initiative, and a member of the advisory boards of the International Center for Transitional Justice, the Archives and Dealing with the Past Project, and a member of the boards of the Global Survivor’s Fund, the Universal Rights Group, and of the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma.

During his term as Special Rapporteur, Pablo conducted country visits to Uruguay, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Tunisia, Spain, Burundi, Sri Lanka and presented over a dozen reports to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly.