Lorena Avila Jaimes is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. Her career involves Colombia and Latin America’s state-building and peace-keeping initiatives, working in projects related to comparative international criminal justice, human rights and transitional justice. She worked as Project Manager of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme for Latin America, as a researcher for the Toledo International Centre for Peace, and as a consultant for non-profit and government agencies. She has taught at different universities in Colombia as Universidad de los Andes, Universidad del Rosario, among others. She is a political scientist with a master's degree in public policy from Universidad National de Colombia. She holds an LLM in international law and human rights and a MSc in victimology and criminal justice from Tilburg University in The Netherlands.