Deidi Olaya is a PhD student in Social Work at the Brown School. Her research interest centers around interpersonal violence with particular focus on economics, gender equality, and violence prevention.

Prior coming to the Brown School, Deidi was as a consultant for UN Women, Conservation International, and Casa de la Mujer on topics related to women in the Colombian peace agreement and political participation. She also worked for several years at the national level in Colombia at Casa de la Mujer in women’s political participation, policy advocacy, and women’s right to have a life free of violence.

Deidi was also a research project director at the Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault at the University of Texas at Austin, where she led the 2015 statewide prevalence study on sexual assault in Texas and worked on other studies, including a participatory action research project on untested sexual assault kits in Houston and the CLASE research project on campus sexual assault on 13 college campuses in Texas.

Her favorite fun activities are hiking, traveling, and practicing yoga.