Directors and Academic Staff
Find out about our current academic staff at HCRI.
Directors
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Professor Larissa Fast - Executive Director and Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies
Larissa is Executive Director and Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies. She is a scholar and practitioner with over two decades of experience at the intersection of research, policy, and practice related to humanitarianism, conflict, and peacebuilding. Her research examines The causes of and responses to violence against conflict interveners, such as aid workers and peacebuilders, the role of data and technology in humanitarian settings, and ways to make intervention more effective, ethical, and responsive to local needs and context.
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Dr Darren Walter - Deputy Director, Programme Director of Online Programmes, and Senior Lecturer in Emergency Global Health
Darren’s research interests are in emergency care system development and capacity building. He has been involved in the WHO Emergency Medical Teams project and supported the WHO Emergency Care System Assessment process. He is a Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Wythenshawe Hospital and a Royal College of Emergency Medicine representative on the Joint Royal Colleges Ambulance Liaison Committee supporting the UK ambulance services.
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Dr Adele Aubrey - Head of Institute Operations and Partnerships
Adele completed a Doctorate in Education at the University of Manchester in enquiry-based learning and dimensions of contextualized power within higher education teaching and learning environments. Her current educational projects are: the development, piloting and assessment of a European training package, focused on operational team training, and training-of trainers of emergency medical teams within low-income countries and resource-poor settings; and arts-based community education in fragile contexts in Nairobi, Soweto and New Delhi.
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Dr Nat O'Grady - Postgraduate Research Director, and Lecturer in Human Geography and Disaster
Nat's research concerns how technological innovation affects security practices. His past research examined the development of risk governance and information sharing protocols in UK emergency response. He is currently probing a new emergency infrastructure that's accruing with government emphasis on smart technologies. For Nat, these technologies and practices are important for understanding how security operates in our time; showing as they do how global futures are imagined, how governments consider the wider environment around them and how we as citizens figure as subjects of power.
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Dr Jessica Hawkins - Undergraduate Programme Director, and Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
Jessica joined HCRI in 2014 as a Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies. Prior to this, she worked as a tutor in the Global Development Institute at the University. Her doctoral research focussed on processes of state formation in Uganda through a historical sociology lens. More recently, she has been investigating the histories of state interventions for displaced people in Northern Uganda. Her teaching centres upon the histories of humanitarianism, war and conflict, and state-society relations, mainly in African case studies.
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Dr Rubina Jasani - Programme Director iBSc Global Health and Lecturer in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response
Rubina's areas of interest are anthropology of violence and reconstruction, medical anthropology with special focus on social suffering and mental illness, and the study of lived Islam in South Asia and the UK. Her doctoral work examined moral and material ‘reconstruction’ of life after an episode of ethnic violence in Gujarat, Western India in 2002.
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Dr Amanda McCorkindale - Postgraduate Teaching Director, and Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
Amanda has an MSc in Education from Hofstra University (2007), an MA in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response (2011) and a PhD (2018) in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response from HCRI at The University of Manchester. Amanda has worked with HCRI throughout her PhD as a tutor across modules and has now joined as a Lecturer in Global Health. Her research focuses on education and humanitarianism. Her interests also include global health, disaster response and the history of humanitarianism.
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Professor Mandy Turner - Director of Research, Professor of Conflict, Peace and Humanitarian Affairs
Mandy’s research focuses on the politics of international intervention, the political economy of development in war-torn societies, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Before joining the HCRI in January 2020, Mandy was the Director of the Kenyon Institute, the British Academy-funded international research centre in East Jerusalem, where she lived and worked for eight years. She has conducted research for the UN and several governments on issues related to conflict and development, and post-conflict peacebuilding, and has published widely on these issues.
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Academic Staff
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Dr Catherine Arthur - Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
Catherine is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies and joined the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute in 2018. Catherine’s research on post-colonial, post-conflict nation-building, identity politics, and symbols focuses particularly on Timor-Leste, and is informed by the Northern Ireland case study as a similarly transitional society.
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Dr Sabah Boufkhed - Lecturer in Global Health
Sabah is an interdisciplinary global health researcher committed to social justice. Her research topics include preparedness and response to public health emergencies, labour exploitation and migrant workers’ health, and palliative care. She was a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London in Global Health Palliative Care within R4HC-MENA. She co-founded organisations aiming at empowering and supporting women and ‘minorities’ in science and academia, is a Trustee for an NGO in Global Health and Development.
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Dr Antoine Burgard - Pathway Lead for MA Humanitarian & Conflict Response, and Lecturer in Contemporary History of Humanitarianism and Disaster
Antoine Burgard holds a History PhD from Université Lumière Lyon 2, and Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. He is currently working on a comparative history of Jewish refugee activism in the UK and Canada in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Hungarian Revolution. He is also conducting a two-year oral history project with the Fondation Claude Levy enfant juif caché in Strasbourg that aims to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Canada, France and the UK.
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Dr Nimesh Dhungana - Lecturer in Disasters and Global Health
Nimesh is an interdisciplinary development and disaster researcher who looks at the political possibilities and challenges of youth-led, bottom-up activism in constructing alternative narratives of care, accountability, and justice in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in Nepal. Nimesh was a post-doctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His PhD research, completed in 2019, used ethnographic and interview data to examine the politics of citizen participation and accountability following the 2015 Nepal earthquakes.
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Dr Ayham Fattoum - Lecturer in Disaster Operations Management
Ayham holds a PhD in business and management, MSc in management for business excellence, and BSc in agriculture engineering. In his PhD project, he supported two UK case studies in evaluating and overcoming the operational challenges associated with engaging spontaneous volunteers during emergencies. Ayham has diverse experience including quality management, HR, and change management in the non-for-profit and commercial sector.
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Dr Kirsten Howarth - Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies and Conflict Response
Kirsten undertook her role in HCRI in January 2014. Prior to this, she was a Teaching Fellow in International Development at the Global Development at the University of Manchester. Kirsten completed her PhD in 2012, analysing the causes of post-war violence and crime in El Salvador. Her current research builds on from her PhD by examining urban violence and its humanitarian consequences.
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Dr Luke Kelly - Research Associate
Luke is a Research Associate at HCRI working on the Evidence and Knowledge for Development (K4D) programme. He received a PhD in history in 2013 from the University of Manchester, where he later worked as a research associate and lecturer. He has published research on the history of British humanitarianism.
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Dr Róisín Read - Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
Róisín joined HCRI in 2014 as part of the Making Peacekeeping Data Work for the International Community project, and is now a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies. Her research sits at the intersection of peace and conflict and humanitarian studies. She is interested in exploring how feminist and postcolonial approaches might help us to understand international interventions in conflict and post-conflict contexts, with a geographical focus on Sudan and South Sudan.
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Dr Sophie Roborgh - Presidential Fellowship in Medical Humanitarianism
Sophie holds a Presidential Academic Fellowship in Medical Humanitarianism. She joined HCRI in October 2018, after completing a PhD and a post-doc at the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on local medical humanitarian initiatives, where she studies grassroots organisation of medical efforts and attacks on local medical staff and infrastructure. She has specifically looked at the case studies of Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine.
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Professor Duncan Shaw - Professor of Operations and Critical Systems
Duncan Shaw is a Professor of Operations and Critical Systems and the Head of the Management Science Group in Alliance Manchester Business School. Duncan's main research interests include Operational Research (OR) and methods to analyse and improve decision making in organisations, such as developing and evaluating new methods to structure complex, socially constructed problems and building stakeholder commitment to implementing change initiatives.
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Dr Stephanie Sodero - Pathway Lead for MSc International Disaster Management, Lecturer in Responses to Climate Crises
Stephanie brings together the fields of climate change, mobility, and medicine to research vital mobilities: movements of people, goods, and information that impact life chances. Her current focus is on how goods, such as blood, saline IV solution, and personal protective equipment, move from the point of production to the point of care, and in what ways such geographically dispersed supply chains are vulnerable to a changing climate. Climate, mobility, and health justice are central to her work.
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Professor Bertrand Taithe - Professor of Cultural History
Born in France, Professor Bertrand Taithe studied at the Sorbonne with Professor François Crouzet and began his career as a historian of urban sociology. He later moved into the history of medicine and sexuality and is particularly interested in the history of humanitarian aid. Professor Taithe is a prolific author and Editor of the European Review of History.
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Dr Birte Vogel - Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies
Birte joined the academic staff of HCRI in 2016. She is the Editor of the HCRI Policy Brief Series and was previously Assistant Editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Peacebuilding. Her two recent, co-edited books reflect her general research interest in the intersection of economics and peace and conflict studies and humanitarianism (Economies of Peace, Routledge, 2019), as well as her interest in the ethics of conducting research in conflict-affected societies (The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork, Palgrave, 2021).
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David Wightwick - Chief Executive of UK-Med
David joined UK-Med in January 2018 as the new Chief Executive of the organisation. He has a background in senior roles in the humanitarian sector, having previously worked as a Senior Adviser in emergency response with the WHO, as Global Operations Director for Merlin, Health Director with GOAL, Director of Operations Management at Save the Children International and as a Country Director with IMC.
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