Kathi Lynn Austin is the founder and Executive Director of the Conflict Awareness Project, where she investigates major arms traffickers and other profiteers who fuel conflict, war and harm to the environment across the world. Her work examines the illicit trade of weapons, illegal supply chains, corruption, natural resource exploitation, and wildlife crime as well as transnational organized crime and terror networks in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. With over 30 years of field experience, she is an internationally recognized expert on human rights, security issues, and the weapons trade and is regularly consulted on arms and human rights-related investigations and litigation.

Ms. Austin has served with the United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC and Liberia, the Chief of the Joint Mission Analysis Centre for the United Nations Peacekeeping Missions in Timor-Leste and Burundi, and a variety of multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations, such as the Fund for Peace, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, the World Bank, and the Open Society Justice Initiative, where she recently served as Senior Advisor for the Anti-Corruption Program. Currently, she is a fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and is working both with the Pacific Council for International Policy on arms-related issues and Rebalance Earth on environmental and wildlife justice initiatives. Austin is also a member of the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime. She was named the Arms Control Association’s “Person of the Year” in 2011.