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 Birte Vogel - Deputy Director and 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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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 Jessica Hawkins - Undergraduate Programme Director and Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
Jessica's teaching centres on histories of humanitarianism and war and conflict with a focus on displacement. Her current research interests lie in the historical sociology of camp formation. This traces the concepts and themes which underpin modern forms of incarceration such as refugee camps and linkages to the camps of the past. She is also interested in the pedagogy of humanitarianism examining how we teach difficult subjects related to violence conflict and displacement. In particular she's researching the value of student research visits to conflict affected societies.
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Professor Darren Walter - Director of Online Programmes, and Professor in International Emergency Medicine
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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Professor Bertrand Taithe - Director of Research and Professor of Cultural History
Humanitarian aid historian Bertrand founded HCRI in 2008. His research focuses on the history of humanitarian medicine. A member of the scientific committee CRASH, he's written articles on the history of humanitarian work, exhibitions and cultural manifestations. He edits the European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs and founded and leads The Humanitarian Archive at the Rylands. He's an editor of the book series Humanitarianism: Key Debates and New Approaches, and Cultural History of Modern War for Manchester University Press.
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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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Miriam Bradley - Director of Postgraduate Research and Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
Miriam joined HCRI in 2023, prior to which she was an Associate Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. Her research examines international responses to conflict, violence, and migration, and she is the author of two books: Protecting Civilians in War: The ICRC, UNHCR, and their Limitations in Internal Armed Conflicts (OUP 2016) and The Politics and Everyday Practice of International Humanitarianism (OUP forthcoming/2023).
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Academic Staff
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Dr Byron Bitanihirwe - Lecturer in Global Health
Byron is a lecturer with varied interests ranging from trauma-informed teaching to translational psychiatry. Some of his ongoing work includes understanding how anomalies in metabolic programming influence psychopathology and addressing gambling harm on the African continent. Prior to joining the HCRI, Byron served as a Principal Consultant for Bank Lombard Odier and a Research Portfolio Analyst for MQ: Transforming Mental Health, a UK mental health research charity. His experience has also included a Roche Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He holds a PhD in Neurobiology from ETH Zurich.
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Dr Sabah Boufkhed - Pathway lead for the iBSc programme and 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 Burgardis a lecturer in history of humanitarianism. He holds a PhD from Université Lyon 2 and Quebec University. Previously a postdoctoral fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris and the Fondation Claude Levy in Strasbourg. He is developing a new project on age and migration control in Britain Canada and France in collaboration with the Rylands Institute and CHSTM. His research and supervision interests include children and young people in situations of conflict and displacement child protection migration and genocides.
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Maria Cullen - Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Maria is a post-doctoral research associate on the Wellcome-funded project ‘Developing Humanitarian Medicine’. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Galway. Adopting a comparative approach, her thesis examined how socio-political backgrounds impacted Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam’s interpretations of ethical humanitarian action in the 1980s. She is interested in the history of humanitarian medicine, along with the tensions that arise between neutrality, solidarity and human rights in humanitarian interventions.
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Dr Nuwan Dias - Lecturer in Disaster Management
Nuwan's broader research interests are Nature Inspired Solutions for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), Multi-Hazard Early Warning, Urban planning to enhance Disaster Resilience and Integrating Climate Change Adaptation with DRR. In multiple capacities, Nuwan has engaged in various DRR Projects since 2013. His latest completed project as the project PI is "An Explanatory Study on Nature Inspired Solutions to Enhance Coastal Resilience." Nuwan holds a PhD in Sustainable Urban Development, an MSc in Urban Design, and a BSc (Hons) in Town and Country Planning.
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Dr Nimesh Dhungana - Lecturer in Disasters and Global Health
Nimesh’s research concerns the interplay between disasters, development and democratic politics with a particular attention to the possibilities and challenges facing participatory and accountability initiatives in disaster contexts. He is currently examining the role of youth led activism in constructing alternative narratives of care, accountability and justice for labour migrants impacted by the Covid19 pandemic in Nepal. His PhD research (from LSE) used ethnographic and interview data to examine the politics of citizen centric governance 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 Rubina Jasani - 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 Luke Kelly - Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies
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 Nat O'Grady - Pathway Lead for MSc International Disaster Management and Senior 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 Omer Aijazi - Lecturer in Disasters and Climate Crisis
Omer is a transdisciplinary scholar of disaster and conflict, interested in how people imagine and claim their worlds in the wake of colonial rule and environmental ruin while in the shadows of empire. Questioning disciplinary norms within disaster studies and the carceral logics of South Asia, he explores these ideas in the mountain borderlands of the disputed territory of Kashmir and its continuity with Northern Pakistan. Omer works alongside international development, humanitarian, and human rights organizations, linking research with policy, practice, and activism.
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Dr Martin Parham - Lecturer in Disaster Management
A lecturer in disaster management, his multi-disciplinary research focuses on community perception, educational engagement and response to multi-hazard risk on small island developing states. With 20 years experience teaching secondary education he is interested in pedagogies to improve risk awareness and the implementation of disaster risk education frameworks. His PhD focused on multi-hazard risk in the Caribbean and his MRes on volcanic risk on basaltic ocean-island volcanoes. He is currently developing qualitative methods to capture disaster risk perception through GIS.
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Dr Róisín Read - Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies (on Parental leave until January 2024)
Róisín joined HCRI in 2014 as part of the Making Peacekeeping Data Work for the International Community project, and is now a Senior 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 - Lecturer in Medical Humanitarianism (on Career break from September 2023-July 2025)
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 Pedro Silva Rocha Lima - Lecturer in Disaster Management
Pedro is a social anthropologist with a research focus on armed violence, humanitarianism, risk, and the state in Brazil. His current project investigates conceptions of normality in relation to gun violence among local state actors and citizens in Greater Rio, through long-term ethnographic research of a program created by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He has also conducted research for MSF and is the convener of EASA’s Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (AHN).
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Dr. Stephanie Sodero - Lecturer in Climate Change and Health
Stephanie focuses on vital mobilities that impact life chances. Her current research examines how medical goods such as blood, saline and oxygen move from points of production to points of care and how such geographically dispersed supply chains can be made more resilient in a changing climate. Care for the climate and communities is central to her work. Stephanie's first book, Under the Weather: Reimagining Mobility in the Climate Crisis, will be published with McGill-Queen’s University Press in autumn 2022.
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Dr Gemma Sou - Senior Lecturer of Environment and Disasters
Gemma is a development geographer interested in human-environment relations. She draws on postcolonial discourse to examine the everyday geographies and politics of climate change, as they relate to three spaces: home, development aid, and creative research translation.
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Dr Kristina Tschunkert - Lecturer in Conflict Studies
Kristina's focus is on both academic and policy-oriented research, specializing in understanding how interventions shape and are shaped by local contexts, particularly within the realm of everyday economic interactions. She draws on prior research experience with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), World Food Programme (WFP), Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). Her PhD explores the implications of humanitarian cash and voucher assistance on host-refugee relations in Lebanon.
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Professor Mandy Turner - 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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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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