Kuukuwa Andam
PhD Candidate
Kuukuwa Andam is a human rights lawyer, researcher, and academic. She has worked on human rights cases for more than a decade; including providing country conditions expertise for asylum cases in the US and UK, and recently defending twenty-one human rights activists who were arrested and incarcerated in Ho, Ghana, while attending a training conference. She has served as a research consultant, and organized training seminars for staff of multiple international organizations including UNFPA, UNESCO, and RFSU.
Graduate Student
Delano Aragao Vaz
PhD Candidate
Delano is currently a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. As an Ontario Trillium Scholarship holder, he is exploring the intersectionality of law and surveillance. His research focuses on socio-legal issues related to race, colonialism, big data, national security, and (suppression of) dissent.
Graduate Student
Abebe Assefa Alemu
PhD Candidate
Abebe Assefa Alemu (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, where his research focuses on the experiences of Deaf individuals within the Criminal Justice System in Ethiopia, under the supervision of professor Cherie Metcalf (PhD). His research interests include access to justice, criminal justice, disability rights, human rights, and women's rights.
Graduate Student
Aileen Editha
PhD Candidate in Law
Aileen (she/her) is a PhD Candidate and Robert Sutherland Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Graduate Inclusivity Fellow at the School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs. Her doctoral thesis explores the recognition of property rights over human biological and genetic materials and its impact on women and racialised minorities. However, she is interested in and has written on other topics such as transplantation and blood banking.
Graduate Student
Wondwossen Firew
PhD Candidate
Prior to becoming a Mastercard Foundation Fellow and joining Queen’s University Faculty of Law in 2019, Wondwossen Firew held a position as an Assistant Professor of Law at the School of Law of University of Gondar for 10 years. In addition to his academic post, he served the School of Law as its Dean. During the past six years, he held an administrative position, in addition to his academic position.
Graduate Student
Marie-Emmanuelle Genesse
PhD Candidate
“Public Health Law and Intimate Partner Violence in Canada: Needs and Legal Responses”
Graduate Student
Michele Leering
Visiting Scholar
Michele is a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s Faculty of Law. Graduating with a PhD from Queen’s Law in 2023, she also served for almost four decades as a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, a non-profit community legal clinic in Belleville, Ontario. As a Visiting Scholar, she is pursuing two research and writing projects. The first advances her doctoral research findings on the importance of cultivating integrative reflective practice as an essential competency for legal professionals.
Faculty Members: Teaching and Research
Mary McPherson
PhD Candidate in Law
Mary McPherson is currently pursuing her PhD in Law at Queen’s University. Her research explores liberal politics of recognition and its critiques in relation to the current changes in Canadian legislation and common law affecting Aboriginal peoples, and the role of Indigenous philosophical revitalization in these legislative and judicial changes.
Graduate Student
Hiwot Mekuanent
PhD Candidate
Hiwot joined the Queen's University Faculty of Law in September 2018. She will be applying her doctoral work at Queen’s Law to help improve the lives of people with disabilities. Admitted into the school’s PhD program as an “exceptional faculty leader” from the University of Gondar in Ethiopia, she has received a Mastercard Foundation Scholarship at Queen’s University to complete her studies. Hiwot’s research focuses on why Ethiopia still has disability discriminatory legal and institutional frameworks against international human rights standards.
Graduate Student
Ryan Minor
Ryan is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, Queens University. His primary research area concerns the use of the tax system to stimulate research and development in Canada. His thesis concerns the potential for Canada to enact a "patent box" under which firms that develop qualifying intellectual property are encouraged to commercialize the IP worldwide from Canada by a low tax rate. Patent boxes are common in Europe and empirical work on the effectiveness of such regimes is sparse.
Graduate Student
Stuart O’Connell
PhD Candidate
Stuart O’Connell is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. His thesis “Expanding the Role of Victims in Criminal Proceedings” examines whether the role and function of victims in Canadian criminal proceedings should significantly expand and, if so, how that change might occur.
Graduate Student
Deepti Panda
PhD Candidate
Deepti has been practicing as an Advocate at the commercial bar of the Bombay High Court since 2007. She has a broad commercial law practice in India, specializing in areas such as commercial litigation and arbitration, bankruptcy proceedings, partnership disputes, real estate and land matters, and estate and succession disputes. She has been appointed as an Arbitrator in over 30 cases by the Bombay High Court and has expertise in conducting civil trials before both courts and arbitration tribunals.
Graduate Student
João Rocha
PhD Candidate
João Carlos Vieira Costa Cavalcanti Rocha is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. His dissertation explores the normative democratic theory and constitutional law, including comparative perspectives.
He obtained an LLM at Queen’s University in 2019. His thesis revolved around an authoritarian era in the history of Brazil – the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas – and its relationship with anti-liberal legal thought.
Graduate Student