Dr Alex P Dela Cruz is an international law academic with an interest in the place of the ocean in a variety of legal projects ranging from post-colonial state-making, maritime security, and more recently, the management of marine plastic pollution. He joins the UNSW School of Global and Public Law as an ARC Discovery Postdoctoral Fellow on the international law duties of persons at sea with Professors Natalie Klein and Sarah Williams.

Before moving to Sydney, Alex worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands and a Blue Security Fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne. In 2024, he was awarded a PhD in International Law from the University of Melbourne, where he also completed an LLM. 

His recent work includes articles in Blue Security: A Maritime Affairs Series and the Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies, as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (OUP, 2023) and Public International Law: A Multi-Perspective Approach (Routledge open-access, 2024).

Alex was admitted to the Philippine Bar in 2014. Prior to academia, he worked in litigation in Manila as counsel to Philippine government clients while teaching law.