Cathryn Costello is a Fellow of the Hertie School. Since 2023, she has been Full Professor of Global Refugee and Migration Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. She was formerly Professor of Fundamental Rights and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School (2020 – 2023). She is a leading scholar of international and European refugee and migration law and also explores the relationship between migration and labour law in her work. She was Professor of International Refugee and Migration Law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford (2013-2023). She was the Principal Investigator of RefMig, a five-year ERC-funded research project exploring refugee mobility, recognition and rights, and the Volkswagen Foundation funded AFAR project, based at the Hertie Centre for Fundamental Rights. In 2025, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for RefLex, an empirical study of the effectiveness of international refugee law. She has also undertaken research for UNHCR, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. She holds a doctorate in law from the University of Oxford.
