Irfana Khatoon is an Economic Governance Researcher at UNU-CPR, where she focuses on advancing research and policy initiatives in international financial architecture (IFA) and economic governance reforms. She also supports the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) with tracking IFA-related policy development.
Prior to her current position, Irfana was a Junior Fellow at UNU-CPR, where she contributed to tracking IFA-related developments for the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism (HLAB). She also interned at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), where she worked on the Regional Integration Knowledge System (RIKS), conducted research on Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), and contributed to developing an index to measure the strength of investor protections offered by BITs.
She has gained research experience through internships and academic projects. At CEU, her thesis focused on the impact of the 2014 sanctions on foreign direct investment in Russia, while her thesis at Sussex explored the geopolitics underlying sectarian conflict in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Additionally, she gained research experience during her undergraduate studies through an internship at Mayer Brown in Hong Kong.