Honorary Fellows
Darren Cormack - Honorary Research Fellow
Darren has over 20 years’ experience in the not-for-profit and private sector, including at senior management and executive level. Darren is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Mines Advisory Group. MAG exists to provide a safe future for people affected by conflict, doing so does through the removal of landmines and UXO and by helping to reduce the impact of armed violence. As CEO Darren is responsible for the overall running and direction of MAG, leading an organisation of over 5,000 staff working 26 countries. To date, MAG’s work has helped over 17 million people.
Darren started out life as a research assistant in Southeast Asia undertaking wildlife surveys in remote parts of Cambodia and the Philippines. Moving into the wider Development sector Darren has led multidisciplinary humanitarian response programmes in South Sudan, Darfur and Indonesia following the tsunami. Darren joined MAG in 2008 and was appointed CEO in 2020. Based in Manchester he holds a first-class Masters in International Management from Lancaster University, is an experienced Non-Executive Director and Advisor at the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction.
Dr Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps
Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps is a lecturer at the History Department of the University of Geneva. She holds a PhD (2014) from the University of Geneva and the University Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne which was published in 2018 under the title L'humanitaire en guerre civile. La crise du baifra (Rennes, PUR). Thanks to the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, she has been a visiting researcher at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (postdoc, 2017-2019), at New York University, King's College London, and the French Institute for Research in Africa in Ibadan (IFRA-Nigeria) (2011-2012). In 2018, she was awarded the "young researcher" prize of the French Red Cross Foundation. She is currently co-investigator in the project "Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French external Resistance, 1940-1945" funded by the AHRC (2020-2022, PI: Laure Humbert) and is working as senior researcher on the project "The Cross and the Red Star: Humanitarianism and Communism in the 20th Century' (2021-2025)" at the University of Fribourg (2021-2025, PI: Jean-François Fayet).
Amy Hughes MBE - Honorary Fellow
Amy is a Senior Educational Fellow for the MSC in Pre-Hospital Care at Queen Mary University London. She was a Clinical Academic Lecturer in Emergency Response at HCRI, The University of Manchester and was awarded an MBE in December 2015 for services to humanitarian and emergency medicine.
Dr Eric Lepp - Honorary Research Fellow
Eric is currently working in the role of Visiting Assistant Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies at University of Waterloo (Canada).
He holds an MA from the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and a PhD in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response from HCRI, where he also worked as a Senior Tutor in Humanitarian Studies following the completion of his degree. His PhD research engaged the legacies and challenges of the longstanding conflict in Northern Ireland within the unorthodox space created by ice hockey in Belfast. Through research conducted side-by-side the supporters of the Belfast Giants, his research focused on the everyday and ‘getting on with it’ in the shadows of longstanding division.
Eric is currently working on an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research project with Birte Vogel (HCRI), Catherine Arthur (HCRI), Billy Haworth (Sydney) and Dylan O’Driscoll (Coventry) that utilises street art and graffiti to offer a commentary on contested spaces. In this project, graffiti is seen as particularly valuable in (post) conflict societies undergoing social and political transformation, as understanding the writing on the walls furthers knowledge of peace and conflict practices, and contributes to understandings of dynamic everyday interactions with (and in) space.
Dr Jack Lopez – Honorary Fellow
Jack is currently working as an Associate Professor of Health and Society in the Department of Peace Studies and International Development (PSID) at Bradford University.
He is a medical and social anthropologist specialising in barriers to healthcare, sexual health and care ethics. Jack also works with the design and ethics of collaborative ethnography. His broader interests are intimate life, gender and intersectional life-course in societies affected by violence and/or conflict. His research region is principally, though not exclusive to Mexico, Latin America and the UK.
Chris Loughran - Honorary Fellow
Chris has 20 years experience in the not-for-profit and public sectors, including at senior leadership level. He specialises in policy, political influence and public affairs. His expertise lies primarily in disarmament, international humanitarian law and conflict recovery and response. His policy interests lie in the political economy of contemporary conflict and poverty, the relationship between fragility and environment, the geopolitics of international aid and aid sector reform.
He has worked in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall and for NGOs in Europe, the Middle East, South/South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. His current role is Senior Policy & Advocacy Advisor for The HALO Trust, a leading global landmine clearance and conflict recovery NGO. He leads HALO’s UK and global policy and political engagement strategy, including at the UN in New York and Geneva.
Chris lives in Manchester. He is a Trustee of Platfform, Wales’s leading mental health and system change charity, and the Association of British Orchestras. He holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a Master's from the School of Oriental & African Studies in the University of London.
Michaël Neuman - Honorary Research Fellow
Michaël is director of studies at Crash / Médecins sans Frontières, having graduated in Contemporary History and International Relations (University Paris-I). He joined Médecins sans Frontières in 1999 and has worked both on the ground (Balkans, Sudan, Caucasus, West Africa) and in headquarters (New York, Paris as deputy director responsible for programmes).
He has also carried out research on issues of immigration and geopolitics. He is co-editor of "Humanitarian negotiations Revealed, the MSF experience" (London: Hurst and Co, 2011). He is also the co-editor of "Saving lives and staying alive. Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management" (London: Hurst and Co, 2016).
Gareth Owen - Honorary Research Fellow
Gareth has been Humanitarian Director at Save the Children UK since 2007, having originally joined the organisation in January 2002 as an emergency adviser. With a background in civil engineering, he has spent the last 20 years working in humanitarian aid.
A senior humanitarian practitioner, Gareth has led operational responses in every major emergency over the past decade, most notably the Iraq conflict, the Asian tsunami and Cyclone Nargis, as well as in Haiti, Pakistan, East Africa, Niger and the Philippines. He has played a pivotal role in the strategic growth of Save the Children's humanitarian activities over the past decade and today he leads a diverse department of more than 150 humanitarian staff. He was awarded an OBE in the 2013 Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to emergency crisis response abroad.
Gareth started out in the Somalia and Angola conflicts, in logistics and security management for Concern Worldwide, then worked in Nepal as a water engineer with VSO. He was also Country Director in Uganda and Head of Mission in Kosovo for Action Contre La Faim, and led the 2001 Gujarat earthquake response for Oxfam.
Professor Richard Williams OBE - Honorary Professor
Prof Williams’ is an Emeritus Professor of Mental Health Strategy in the Welsh Institute for Health and Social Care in the University of South Wales (since 2014) and Convener (Chief Examiner) for the Diploma in the Medical Care of Catastrophes for the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of the City of London (since 2012-2016).
Until retirement in 2014, his roles have included Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist; Professor of Mental Health Strategy in the Welsh Institute for Health and Social Care; Director of the NHS Health Advisory and Drugs Advisory Services; Vice Chair of the Mental Health Act Commission; Special Professional Adviser on Child and Adolescent Mental Health to the Welsh Government; and chair of the Academy of Royal Colleges in Wales.
Professor Williams has special interests in values-based practice and disaster healthcare. His research and scholarship is on child and adolescent mental healthcare policy, clinical governance, and user and carer participation in service design and delivery. He has a particular research and strategic interest in psychosocial resilience. Since 2005, he has been working on psychosocial care for survivors of disasters, public responses to untoward events, and communicating with the public about risk, resilience and recovery.
In 2010, he was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to medicine. In 2014, he was elected to the highest honour that the Royal College of Psychiatrists can bestow, its Honorary Fellowship.