Dr. Kate Frieson

Associate faculty

Humanitarian Studies

Dr. Kate Grace Frieson has 25 years’ professional and practitioner experience in international development work in Southeast and South Asia and Europe, including 10 years in Cambodia. She joined Royal Roads University in April 2015. Her thematic expertise includes post-conflict state democratization and decentralization, protection frameworks and policy application of human rights (social, political, economic), gender equity and social justice initiatives in natural resource management and climate change. Her current research projects include Political Transitions and Peacebuilding in Myanmar (2015-2017) and Gendered Statelessness and Economic Violence in Myanmar and Nepal (2015-2018).

Experience

Frieson has held various positions with the United Nations including, information analyst, UN spokesperson, human rights investigator, international gender expert and gender and social determinants of health expert. She was the gender and education expert contributor to the World Bank World Development Report on Gender Equity. Frieson also taught political science in the University of Victoria’s Asia-Pacific Department and at McGill University.

She has received numerous awards for her work including a Social Research and Humanities Research Council Research grant for her Gender and Nationalism in Cambodia research project, a Science Social Science Research Council program grant for her dissertation research, a Social Science and Humanities Research Council four-year doctoral scholarship, the Henry Luce Fellowship for Foreign Language Study, the Foreign Area Language Scholarship at the University of Hawaii and a Politics Department Doctoral Dissertation Field Research Grant from Monash University. 

Education

1992
Doctor of Philosophy in Politics

Monash University in Australia

1985
Master of Arts in Political Science

University of British Columbia

1984
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science

University of British Columbia