Elif Mendos Kuskonmaz joined the School of Law at University of Portsmouth as a Lecturer in August 2018.

She holds a Bachelor degree and a Master degree in Law from Istanbul University, and an LLM degree in Public International Law from Queen Mary University of London. Since 2012, she has been registered as a lawyer at Istanbul Bar Association.

In September 2015 she was awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistant scholarship at the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London to start a PhD program in Law. Her research explored the compatibility of transfers of passenger information for fighting terrorism with privacy and data protection rights. She was a visiting researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center, Washington D.C., from April 2018 to June 2018, and she completed her PhD in January 2020.

She also worked as a research intern at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in the winter of 2014 and she volunteered at the NGO Privacy International in the autumn of 2015.

Elif has written on issues related to Passenger Name Records agreements, privacy and data protection. Her research interests mainly concentrate in three areas: anti- and counter-terrorism, surveillance law, and human rights law. She is particularly interested in surveillance measures in the context of national security and law enforcement, and their relation with the right to privacy.