People Biography

Biography

Elena I. Athwal is an S.J.D. candidate at HBKU College of Law and a research fellow at the UNESCO chair on environmental law and sustainable development. She is the founder and chief executive officer of ICELIS Global, a Qatar Financial Centre-licensed strategic advisory firm, and chair of the energy transition working group at ICC Qatar in partnership with the Al-Attiyah Foundation. She is the recipient of the IBA SEERIL law studies scholarship (2025–2026), the first student in the Middle East to receive this honoured distinction.

Her doctoral research examines legal frameworks for environmental protection, focusing on the intersections of international trade law, sustainable development, and environmental crime. Her wider scholarship addresses climate governance, ESG compliance, biodiversity protection, and the legal architecture of the global energy transition, with sustained engagement with multilateral instruments including the Paris Agreement, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, CITES, and the Basel Convention.

Elena holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a J.D. from Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Law, where she received Her Highness Shaikha Moza Al-Ihsan’s Excellence Award (top 1% across eight colleges). She also holds an M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. With eighteen publications across Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer, Edward Elgar, Routledge, Bloomsbury, and Palgrave Macmillan, she has collaborated with UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNCTAD, and the World Bank on environmental governance, legal reform, and policy development across the Gulf, MENA, Africa, and Latin America.