Denise Venturi’s unique profile bridges legal scholarship with extensive professional practice in the field of asylum and refugee protection. She is a final-stage PhD candidate in Law at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and her research applies vulnerability theory to asylum adjudication, with a focus on sexual orientation and gender identity. Her academic work is interdisciplinary, integrating legal analysis with anthropological perspectives. She has been a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and Liverpool University (UK), and a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany). Denise’s academic path is enriched by professional experience with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in various protection roles, including refugee status determination, judicial engagement, law and policy, and training. She collaborated with the Sanremo Institute for International Humanitarian Law to develop courses on refugee law, and worked on strategic litigation and advocacy with the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and other NGOs in Italy and Europe.  She was admitted to the bar in Italy as a qualified lawyer on asylum and criminal law matters.