Katharina Ó Cathaoir

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Law, University of Copenhagen

Katharina Ó Cathaoir researches health and human rights law. Originally from Ireland, she studied
law at University College Cork and received an LL.M. in international law from Trinity College
Dublin. Subsequently, Ó Cathaoir worked as a judicial researcher under the supervision of Mr.
Justice Peter Charleton, followed by a stint as a legal advisor at the Permanent Mission of Ireland
to the United Nations (New York).

Since 2014, Ó Cathaoir has lived and researched in Denmark, where she wrote her PhD on child-
ren’s rights in the context of obesogenic food marketing. Post-PhD, Ó Cathaoir has been a re-
searcher in multiple interdisciplinary projects, examining, inter alia, the extent to which Danish law
on genetics protects patients and vulnerable groups and patients’ rights in regard to the use of big
data in health research. Furthermore, Ó Cathaoir was Principal Investigator of a project funded by
the Independent Research Fund Denmark, “Legislating Corona: Proportionality, Non-Discrimination
and Transparency (PRONTO).” She has published in, inter alia, the European Journal of Health Law,
Nordisk Socialrättslig Tidskrift, Juristen, and Health and Human Rights Journal.

Ó Cathaoir is a board member of Nordic PerMed Law and a Danish representative of the International
Genetic Discrimination Observatory led by the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University
in Montreal. She also sits on the Steering Committee of the Nordic Alliance for Clinical Genomics.

As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Ó Cathaoir will carry out a five-year research project entitled “The
Law on Health Data Outliers,” focused on legal issues pertaining to groups that may be left behind
by the so-called big data revolution in healthcare, in particular women, children, older persons, and
ethnic minority groups.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.