Sarah Knuckey Awarded Global Innovation Fund Grant

Sarah Knuckey, Columbia Law School’s Lieff Cabraser Associate Clinical Professor of Law, was awarded a Columbia University President’s Global Innovation Fund grant to research the psychological impact of war on individuals, families, and communities in Yemen. 

The faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute and director of the CLS Human Rights Clinic, Knuckey has worked on projects around the world—including in Yemen, the Central African Republic, and Papua New Guinea. The Global Innovation Fund awards grants for faculty members across the University to leverage and engage the eight Columbia Global Centers in Amman, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. The program supports projects within and across these sites, in order to increase global opportunities for research, teaching, and service.

Knuckey’s project—which she will undertake with Lindsay B. Stark, Associate Professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health—will look to advance research, services, and advocacy for those affected by violence in Yemen. It was one of 11 projects selected by a review committee of senior faculty drawn from both the Morningside and medical campuses. Projects receiving awards focus on a diverse array of topics, ranging from religion and populism to wildfires and deforestation to urban poverty. Many are highly collaborative, with faculty members working across University departments and schools, and partnering with other academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and research consortia.  

Knuckey is a founding editor of Just Security, a site analyzing U.S. national security law and policy. She has also served as an adviser to the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions (2007–2016) and as chair of the Legal Working Group on the redrafting of the Minnesota Protocol. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty, she was an adjunct professor of clinical law and director of the Initiative on Human Rights Fact-Finding and the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at New York University School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a clerk to Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia.

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Published June 5, 2017