Globally recognised scholar and practitioner in international law, human rights, forced migration, gender, and the protection of vulnerable populations including children. Her work has been recognised with multiple prizes, among them the 2002 Fundación Caja Madrid National Research Prize for pioneering research on unaccompanied migrant children — bringing this phenomenon to scholarly and policy attention for the first time and shaping the frameworks through which it has since been understood.
Educated at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Queen's University Belfast, with postgraduate work at the University of Bradford, the University of Oxford (COMPAS), and Sciences Po Paris — where she was awarded a unanimous Cum Laude PhD in Political Sciences and International Relations — and holding a Project Management Professional qualification from UC Berkeley, she has spent more than two decades as a senior adviser, monitoring officer, and chief programme manager for the UN, EU, OSCE, and major NGOs. She has delivered consequential programmes on human movements, rule of law and justice, gender, children's protection, and legislative reform across more than twenty-five countries — leading teams of up to 120 staff and overseeing annual budgets of up to ten million dollars.
The new architectures of population management do not produce governance voids by failure or neglect — they produce them by design, constructing spaces where democratic accountability cannot follow and responsibility cannot be assigned.
As Executive Director of TDE Institute, Bermúdez provides strategic and intellectual leadership across all of the Institute's research programmes, partnerships, and fellowship initiatives. Her research interrogates the structural conditions under which democratic institutions fulfil, circumvent, or abandon their obligations — examining the questions of protection, exclusion, accountability, and ultimate sovereignty that define the democratic project. She is a founding member of solaceforum.org.
AwardsTeaching Excellence Awards, Sociology of Humanitarianism and Immigration and Inequality, UC Irvine (2023–2024). UN Special Award for Justice Building (2011). Outstanding PhD Dissertation and Publication Prize, Sciences Po Presse, Paris (2004). National Research Prize, Unaccompanied Minor Migrants, Fundación Caja Madrid, Spain (2002). Murray Edelman Prize on the Study of the UN (1998).