Who We Are

Co-Directors

Rachel Chambers

Rachel Chambers is Assistant Professor of Business Law at the University of Connecticut School of Business, where she teaches Business and Human Rights and Social Responsibility and Accountability in Business. Previously at SOAS, University of London, she taught about the regulation of multinational enterprises.

Dr. Chambers directs UConn’s Business and Human Rights Initiative, working with colleagues to further its mission to develop and support multidisciplinary and engaged research, education, and public outreach at the intersection of business and human rights. She advises UConn’s President’s Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility on the advancement of socially responsible policies within the university.

Dr. Chambers’ doctorate in law from the University of Essex considers the challenges of extraterritorial solutions to human rights abuses in global business operations. Her current research includes comparative work on transnational tort litigation and analysis of the accountability potential of laws mandating human rights disclosure and due diligence by corporations. Her publications include articles in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law and the Chicago Journal of International Law, as well as her forthcoming co-edited volume, the Cambridge Research Handbook on Business and Human Rights Litigation.

Dr. Chambers’ background is in the practice of law. She is a Barrister (England and Wales) with a decade of experience in trial and appeal court advocacy, specializing in employment and discrimination law. She has worked as a consultant to major players in the business and human rights sphere, including the UN Global Compact and Amnesty International.

Samentha Goethals

Samentha Goethals, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Business & Society at SKEMA Business School and Visiting Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, where she contributes to the FRONTIERS project on sustainability due diligence for a just transition. She holds a PhD in Politics from Oxford Brookes University and has developed an interdisciplinary research agenda that bridges socio-legal studies, global governance, and organizational theory, grounded in years of advocacy and field-based research with NGOs and human rights defenders in high-risk and transitional contexts, such as the mining sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Her on-going work focuses on the translation of human rights in business and corporate responsibility in situations of forced migration and labour exploitation, shaped by policy-oriented research in the garment industry in Turkey and Jordan, and the agri-food sector in Europe. This work has resulted in several publications, including the award-winning article ‘Migrant Workers’ ‘Rights-Talk’ in the British Hospitality Sector’ (Business and Human Rights Journal, 2019) and ‘Business and Human Rights as Sensemaking: A Multi-Level Framework for Organizational Translation’ (Business & Society, 2025). She is Book Review Editor and co-editor of the special issue on Business, Human Rights, and Just Transition in the Energy and Extractive Sectors in the Business and Human Rights Journal. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Beyond Boundaries: Methodological Approaches in Business, Human Rights and the Environment (Springer), which brings together innovative empirical and methodological contributions to the field.

Her current research expands the scope of corporate human rights responsibility to examine how businesses engage with sustainability due diligence in the context of just transition. She is especially interested in participatory, inclusive and embodied approaches to research and governance, including the use of arts-based methodologies to engage affected communities and non-human stakeholders in shaping more accountable and equitable futures. Samentha brings this critical, practice-informed perspective into the classroom, designing and delivering Business and Human Rights courses for students of management, law, and politics, as well as MBAs, social auditors, financiers, and human rights defenders across diverse institutional and regional settings.

Tricia Olsen

Tricia D. Olsen, PhD, is professor and the Stassen Chair at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She is also a non-resident Sié Fellow at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. Olsen studies and teaches about business ethics and the political economy of development, with a focus on Latin America. Dr. Olsen’s book, Seeking Justice: Access to Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuse (Cambridge University Press, 2023), provides an in-depth exploration of victims’ access to remedy mechanisms for corporate human rights abuses. The findings in her book are drawn from her original, large-N database of historical trends of businesses’ human rights practices, the Corporations & Human Rights (CHRD) database. Olsen has received support from various organizations for her research, including the National Science Foundation, USAID, Fulbright-Hays, the Carnegie Corporation, and the British Academy/Leverhulme. Her published work can be found in World Development, Organization Studies, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Comparative Political Studies, among others. Previously, Olsen was professor and associate dean at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Olsen earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Co-Directors

Board Members