Dr Priya Urs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, where her research addresses the applicability of international law to cyber operations. Her wider research interests include international criminal law, the international law on the use of force and international humanitarian law, as well as general aspects of international law. Priya’s research has been published in, among others, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice and the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law. She has also contributed to the Oxford Handbook of the International Law of Global Securityand the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law.

Priya received her PhD in law from University College London (UCL) (2021). Her doctoral research in international criminal law sought to arrive at a suitable balance between prosecutorial discretion and judicial oversight in the application of the gravity criterion for admissibility at the International Criminal Court. She holds an LLM from the University of Cambridge (2014), where she was awarded a First Class degree and the David Thompson Prize (Homerton College), and a BA, LLB from the National Law School of India University (2013).

Priya teaches Law and Public Policy on the School’s Master of Public Policy programme. She has previously taught on the MA in Human Rights and MSc in Security Studies at the UCL Department of Political Science, School of Public Policy (2019-20) and on the LLB and LLM programmes at the UCL Faculty of Laws (2018-20). She was also a coordinator for the UCL Public International Law Pro Bono Project (2018-20), which in 2018 received a Provost’s Education Award.

Prior to starting her PhD, Priya spent three years as a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law in Heidelberg, Germany (2014-2017), where she designed and implemented institutional capacity-building projects in conflict and post-conflict states.