Carolina Gottardo is a migrant lawyer and economist who has worked on human rights issues for more than 20 years in different countries and contexts. Her areas of specialisation are migration, asylum and gender.

Carolina started at IDC in November 2020. Before commencing at IDC, she was the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Australia for almost four years, and the director of the Latin American Women's Rights Service (LAWRS), a UK women’s rights organisation working with refugee and migrant women for almost six years. She was also a senior manager at the British Institute of Human Rights, British Red Cross and One World Action (now Womankind Worldwide) in the UK, and she served as the National Policy and Research Director of the Refugee Council of Australia.

Carolina worked for the Constitutional Court and the UN Development Programme in her native country, Colombia. She has served on a number of boards related to human rights, gender, migration and refugee issues in London, Melbourne, Bangkok, Bogota and Brussels. She is currently a member of the board of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) and the Global Coalition for Migration (GCM). Carolina is currently a member of the Global UN Women Expert Working Group to address the human rights of women in the Global Compact for Migration, and a co-lead of the UN Migration Network Working Group on Alternatives to Detention.

Carolina has a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Economics from the Universidad de los Andes, as well as a MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Carolina is the mother of three boys and enjoys spending time with her family.