Professor Katrin Kuhlmann is a leading expert in issues of international economic law, development, trade law, agriculture and food security, and comparative law. Her research and teaching focus on international law and development, trade law and regional trade agreements, international economic law and institutions, digital law and regulation, agricultural law, fashion and the law, sustainable development, international legal theory, and empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to international law. In addition to her roles as Professor from Practice and Faculty Director of the Center on Inclusive Trade and Development, she is also the faculty director of the International Trade Law Certificate program at Georgetown Law.

In 2010, Professor Kuhlmann founded the New Markets Lab (NML), a non-profit law and development innovation lab focused on empirical legal and regulatory research.  She serves on a number of boards and advisory boards, including the AI Institute for Food Systems at University of California Davis; the Yeutter Institute of International Trade and Finance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the Forum on Trade, Environment, and the SDGs of the Geneva Graduate Institute and UN Environment Programme; the Harvard Law and Development Society; the Washington International Trade Association; and Listening for America. She is also a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the WTO Gender Research Hub, and the Trade and Investment Law Group of the Law Schools Global League.

Professor Kuhlmann was previously a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School, and she was the Yeutter Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law from 2020-21.  She has also served as a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and she was a member of the Trade Advisory Committee on Africa of the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) for over a decade. Earlier in her career, she served as a trade negotiator at USTR and a lawyer at two international law firms, and she has held senior positions with several non-profit organizations and think tanks, including the Aspen Institute and German Marshall Fund.  She holds degrees from Harvard Law School and Creighton University and was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to study international economics.

Professor Kuhlmann is widely published in the areas of international law and development, international trade law, and comparative international law.  Her contributions include methodological and theoretical approaches to international law, including her ongoing project on “Micro International Law” (Stanford Journal of International Law, 2025), which proposes the study of disaggregated national and sub-national legal innovations that contribute to international legal design and norm setting.