Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a globally recognized international women's rights expert. She serves as the Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she teaches international women's rights and has been appointed Leader-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program for 2019-2020 academic year. She serves as an Advisor to the National Security Council on addressing legal barriers that preclude women's economic participation in developing economies, with an emphasis on Africa. Before coming to Penn Law, she was the inaugural director of the Global Women's Leadership Initiative and the Women in Public Service Project launched by Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Seven Sisters Colleges at Wellesley College which then moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Recently, she developed a Gender Supplement to the U.N. Secretary General's Guidelines on Disability, and a report to the World Bank on Women's Voice and Agency. Currently, she is working on a chapter on gender equality and leadership for the Handbook on the Sustainable Development Goals, Oxford University Press.