Dr. Lene Guercke

Dr. Lene Guercke is a research associate at the Chair of Human Rights Policy, where she leads the transdisciplinary research project “Unmasking Supply Chains: Leveraging Digital Human Rights Investigations for Corporate Accountability.” The project is carried out in collaboration with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s Change! Initiative.

Previously, Lene was a postdoctoral fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a senior researcher in the Investigations Program on various digital open-source investigations. Her current research interests include, among other things, corporate accountability, supply chains and human rights, open-source investigations in the field of human rights, as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

Lene earned her Ph.D. in law from the University of Leuven in Belgium. Her dissertation focused on state responsibility in cases of enforced disappearances perpetrated by organized crime groups, combining doctrinal legal research with qualitative research methods. The dissertation was published in 2025 as part of the book series Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights. Outside of academia, Lene has worked as an independent consultant and researcher in the field of human rights and spent several years working with civil society organizations in Mexico.