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.

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.

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.