Maria Gavouneli is a Professor in the Law Faculty of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a member of the Athens Public International Law Centre (Athens PIL), Director of the University of Athens’ Refugee and Migration Studies Hub, and Director General of ELIAMEP. During the 2018–2019 academic year, she was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley as a Fulbright Scholar. She graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Athens (1987, A. Papadakis Scholarship, M. Stasinopoulou Prize) and from the University of Cambridge, where she obtained an LL.M. in international law (1988) and a Ph.D. in international environmental law (1994, Greek State Scholarship). For her doctoral thesis on: “Pollution from offshore installations”, she was awarded the international Paul Guggenheim Prize.
Visiting Professor in Greece and abroad at institutions including the Hague Academy of International Law, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the universities of Edinburgh (Brodies Lecture), Oxford, Manchester, Glasgow, Utrecht, Ankara, Tulane, Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne) and Paris 2 (Panthéon Assas), the NUS Academy of International Law, and the Nippon Fellows programme at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea – ITLOS. Her extensive publications include five monographs: Pollution from offshore installations (Martinus Nijhoff, 1995 – Guggenheim Prize), State Immunity and the Rule of Law (Ant. N. Sakkoulas, 2001), Functional jurisdiction in the Law of the Sea (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007), Energy installations in the sea (Nomiki Bibliothiki, 2016) and Energy at Sea (Edward Elgar, 2024). She has edited eight collective works, contributed a large number of papers to collective volumes, and published numerous articles in Greek, English, French and Italian. She is fluent in Spanish and has a basic knowledge of German. She is one of the editors-in-chief of the Yearbook of International Environmental Law (OUP).
President of the International Law Association – the Greek branch of the ILA, and Vice President of the Hellenic Society of International Law & International Relations. She is also President of the Greek National Commission for Human Rights—GHCHR, a member of the Management Board of the National Transparency Authority, and a member of the National Accessibility Authority.