Dr. Gunawardena-Vaughn is director of the International Religious Freedom and the Southeast Asia programs at Freedom House.  She joined Freedom House in 2009 and during her first year, in addition to overseeing the International Religious Freedom Consortium, managed the Global Human Rights Program. Prior to joining Freedom House, she served for eight years as a Program Director at Amnesty International USA where she directed its global death penalty abolition campaign. Dr. Gunawardena-Vaughn began her human rights career as a student and has led grassroots activist projects that focused on death penalty abolition, domestic violence/gender issues, immigrant rights, LGBTI equality, poverty alleviation, juvenile justice, and HIV-AIDS. She is highly experienced in mobilizing a diverse range of faith communities to engage in human rights campaigns and has written extensively on ethnic/religious identity politics. Her dissertation focused on the role of the Sikh diaspora in shaping identity politics in the Punjab and she has presented social scientific research findings at invited meetings sponsored by the Council of Europe, the Ford Foundation, and the Asia Committee of the European Science Foundation. Dr. Gunawardena-Vaughn was raised in Great Britain, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin with a theoretical focus on ethno-religious nationalism and a regional emphasis on South Asia.