Dr. Rachela Er’el is the incoming Israel Institute Fellow at UCLA’s Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the UCLA School of Law. She holds a Ph.D. in Law from the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Dr. Er’el’s research focuses on deprivation of liberty, prisons, punishment, and international human rights law, employing comparative, theoretical, and multidisciplinary approaches. Her doctoral dissertation earned the prestigious Malcolm and Judith Shaw Prize for excellence in public international law and human rights, and she was also awarded the Mishael Cheshin Academic Excellence Grant for her LL.M. thesis, which explored topics in international, public, and criminal law.

Beyond academia, Dr. Er’el has extensive experience in human rights advocacy with a specialization in prisoners' rights. She has worked with the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, founded and directed an academic clinic for prisoners’ rights, served as an external legal advisor to the Interior Committee of the Israeli Knesset on prisoners, and acted as an official prison visitor for over a decade.