Helle Porsdam is Professor of History and Cultural Rights in the Faculties of Humanities and Law at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where she also holds the UNESCO Chair in the Right to Science. She did her PhD in American Studies at Yale University and has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School. In 2021, she was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge and before that, she was a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York City.

Porsdam has written extensively on cultural rights, especially the right to science. Among her most recent work may be mentioned her monographs The Transforming Power of Cultural Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Science as a Cultural Human Right (University of Pennsylvania Series in Human Rights, 2022), her co-authored volume Scientific Freedom: The Heart of the Right to Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and her co-edited volume The Right to Science: Then and Now (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Though little known, the human right to science offers, Porsdam argues, the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally. She actively works together with UNESCO to support science as a common global good.