About

I have been working professionally on issues of migration and displacement in the legal, policy, and humanitarian sectors since 2010. I now work as a Researcher with the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. I am part of its Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity team, in which I manage knowledge exchange initiatives to support integration and welcoming work by local and regional authorities across the UK.

During my PhD, I worked with the Migration Team at the Greater London Authority (GLA), supporting its Asylum Welcome programme and development of its toolkit for local authorities and practitioners.

Before that I worked with the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS), an interagency service founded by UNHCR and other partners based in Geneva, Switzerland. With JIPS, I managed large-scale data collection projects on internal displacement in collaboration with governments, humanitarian and development actors, working in a wide range of displacement contexts, especially in Central America and the Middle East. This work increasingly engaged urban development and local government stakeholders as cities became recognized as sites of both refuge and intervention, for example through the work of the Global Alliance for Urban Crises.

I embarked on a PhD in the London School of Economics’ Regional and Urban Planning Studies Program in its Department of Geography and Environment to better understand these trends. Supported by the International Inequalities Institute, I developed a PhD project on local government responses to forced migration, developing case studies in Colombia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

My approach to research values co-production and collaboration with policymakers and practitioners, mixing research methods, and drawing from different disciplines to understand a problem or question in new and critical ways. My interdisciplinary interests stem from a Bachelors in Anthropology and German from the University of Chicago and a Masters in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

I am currently a Visiting Fellow in the London School of Economics Department of Geography and Environment, a Research Affiliate of the Internal Displacement Research Programme, and a frequent contributor to the network Researching Internal Displacement.