The RefMig core team is led by the Principal Investigator, Professor Cathryn Costello. The project also benefitted from the expert knowledge of our academic advisory board members and ethics advisor.
Current RefMig Team
Cathryn Costello
Full Professor of Global Refugee and Migration Law, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin (from July 2023)
Cathryn Costello is Full Professor of Global Refugee and Migration Law, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin (from July 2023). From 2020-2023, she was Professor of Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights. From 2013-2023, she was Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.
Link to UCD profile.
Natalie Welfens
Postdoctoral Researcher
Natalie Welfens is a postdoctoral researcher working on the project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’. Natalie’s research focusses on questions around categorisation practices and resulting inequalities, inclusion and exclusion in refugee recognition processes, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. Her research combines insights from feminist theories, international relations, and critical migration studies to study these themes in a holistic manner. Natalie completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam in 2021. Her doctoral dissertation examined social and administrative categorisation practices in Germany’s humanitarian admission programmes from Lebanon and Turkey and how they stratify, include and exclude refugees in different parts of the admission process. In addition to that, Natalie has researched gender mainstreaming in European asylum and migration policies. Natalie holds a Double-Master in International Relations and Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and Freie Universität Berlin, and a Bachelor in European Studies from Sciences Po Paris, campus Nancy. After her Masters she worked as a research associate at the Center for European Integration at Freie Universität Berlin, where she also taught seminars on European refugee and migration policy.
Mitali Agrawal
Research Associate
Mitali Agrawal is a research associate working on the project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’. Her research focuses on the role of the UNHCR in refugee recognition procedures globally. Her research draws on quantitative political science work on refugee recognition rates and theories of state-IO relations in order to understand the dynamics behind acceptance (and rejection) of asylum applications. She has a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School, Berlin and a B.A.LLB. from the National Law University, Jodhpur in India. Interested in evidence-based policy research, she worked as a Research Associate for Pratham Education Foundation, designing and implementing large-scale surveys. During this time, she conducted extensive fieldwork and research on assessment of learning outcomes of children in rural India.
Shruthi Naik
Shruthi Naik is a research associate working on the project 'Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights'. Her areas of interest include inequality, gender, and accountability in governance. She has a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School, Berlin and a B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She has worked extensively on research and policy in the areas of access to justice and judicial policy reform in India. Her experience includes analysing judicial data and advising the government and judiciary, leading large household surveys, and editing a book on the impact of judicial delays.
Former RefMig Team Members
Caroline Nalule
Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2018-2021)
Caroline worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the European Research Council Funded project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’ betwwen 2018-2021. Caroline Nalule is a PhD in law graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her thesis was about migration rights of citizens in the East African Community. She holds an LLM in international human rights law from Lund University, Sweden and LLB from Makerere University, Uganda. She has more than ten years’ experience working in the field of human rights and international law. She has previously worked with Riara University, Nairobi; the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Africa Office; and also the Uganda Human Rights Commission. Her areas of expertise and interest include: public international law, human rights law, regional economic communities, citizenship and migration law, refugee law, international criminal law; legal and policy analysis
Derya Ozkul
Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2018-2021)
Derya Ozkul worked as research officer for the project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’ between 2018-2021. She is interested in all the processes of refugee status determination with a particular interest on the construction of vulnerability criteria. Derya is now working on the project ‘Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum-Seekers and Refugees’(AFAR) sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. Previously she completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney on the impact of changing Australian and German diversity and immigration policies over migrants’ struggle for recognition. Previously she worked for a number of Australian Research Council-funded projects including Syrian and Iraqi Resettlement Outcomes in Australia and Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century which investigated the processes of migration in Australia, South Korea, Turkey and Mexico in the context of the broader processes of social transformation. Before her PhD, Derya worked as a researcher at the Migration Research Centre at Koc University in Istanbul. She holds an MSc degree in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA degree in Political Science from Bogazici University in Turkey. As a DAAD alumnus, she held fellowships at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Bielefeld University in Germany. Derya has published on precarious work, refugee resettlement, immigration and diversity policies in Turkey, Germany and Australia. Her work includes Social Transformation and Migration (Palgrave, 2015).
Angela Sherwood
Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2019-2020)
Angela Sherwood worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for the RefMig project between 2019-2020, primarily focusing on the legal obligations and regulation of international organisations in the global refugee and migration regimes with particular attention to the IOM.
Angela completed her doctorate in law at Queen Mary University where she also taught seminars on state crime, disaster displacement, and forced evictions. Angela previously worked for Amnesty International as a researcher and advisor on migrants’ rights, where she investigated supply chain human rights abuse and regulatory failures to protect labour migrants. Prior to this, Angela worked for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for nine years in humanitarian operations, research and policy development, at IOM’s headquarters in Geneva and in its field offices in Haiti, East Timor, South Africa, Tunisia, Mongolia, and Zimbabwe. She has also co-led two mixed methods studies on internal displacement in Haiti and the Philippines for the IOM and the Brookings Institution.
Angela’s recent publications include Grabbing Solutions: Internal Displacement and Post-Disaster Land Occupations in Haiti (in Refugees’ Roles in Resolving Displacement and Building Peace: Beyond Beneficiaries); Haiti’s Disaster Urbanisms: The Emerging City of Canaan (in The Routledge Handbook of Informal Urbanization); and Researching the Resolution of Post-Disaster Displacement: Reflections from Haiti and the Philippines (in the Journal of Refugee Studies). Angela's current research interests cover topics of borders and mobility, the role of corporations and international institutions in migration governance, and the criminology of humanitarianism.
Bryony Varnam
Project Administrator (2018-2021)
Bryony was Project Coordinator for the project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Bryony was responsible for project related communications, periodic reporting to the ERC, organising workshops and events and editorial assistance on project outputs.
Bryony previously worked in the Department of Politics as Programme Officer for the ESRC Public Services Programme and as a Research Assistant in the Department of Social Policy. Bryony has been a researcher on a number of European Commission funded projects concerned with highly skilled mobility, ‘brain drain’, and the circulation and return of researchers within the EU including undertaking an Impact Assessment of the Marie Curie Fellowship Programme (FP4/5) She is co-author of Moving People and Knowledge: Scientific Mobility in an Enlarging European Union, (Edward Elgar, 2008).
Associated Researchers
Megan Bradley
Associate Professor, McGill University
Megan Bradley is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in Political Science and International Development Studies at McGill University, where her research focuses on refugees and internal displacement, and examines issues including the resolution of forced migration; disasters and displacement; transitional justice; and accountability for human rights violations against forced migrants. She has a longstanding interest in the global refugee regime and the roles of international organizations such as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Professor Bradley is collaborating with Professor Cathryn Costello and Dr. Angela Sherwood on an edited collection examining the obligations and accountability for the International Organization for Migration.
Jessica Breaugh
Research Associate
Jessica Breaugh is an associated researcher for the project ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’ developing a cross national survey of current and former UNHCR employees, and legal aid organisations for the project. She received her PhD from the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany and is a DAAD alumnus. Prior to this, she was engaged as an officer with the Department of Foreign Affairs Canada in the United Kingdom and Germany, with a short placement in Hungary. Working predominantly with survey methods, her research focuses on questions related to motivation, altruism, and employee work perceptions and outcomes in the public sector.
Chris Dolan
Professor in Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick
Chris Dolan is Professor in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He has worked extensively with refugee and IDP populations, often at the interface of research, policy and practice, notably in his previous position as Director of Refugee Law Project, Makerere University, Kampala. His work on gender-based violence and victimisation of conflict-affected persons feeds into training and global advocacy on the need for inclusive and non-binary understandings of gender and sexuality. His interest in refugee status determination processes and the political, social and cultural histories, assumptions and interests that underlie multiple exclusions from status, began while working as an expert witness for asylum seekers in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s.
Ahmed Elbasyouny
PhD Fellow, Center for Constitutional Democracy
Ahmed Elbasyouny (Egypt) is a PhD Fellow at Indiana University (IU) Maurer School of Law's Center for Constitutional Democracy. At IU, he researches post-Arab Spring constitutional design and works as an Associate Instructor for an International Law course. Previously, he worked with two members of Parliament in Egypt and consulted with the UNDP Governance Team in Lao PDR and International IDEA Constitution-Building Program.
Luisa Feline Freier
Associate Professor, Universidad del Pacífico
Prof. Freier is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru), and IDRC Research Chair on Forced Displacement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research focuses on migration and refugee policies and laws in Latin America, south-south migration and the Venezuelan displacement crisis. Prof. Freier has published widely in both academic and media outlets, and has been interviewed on the Venezuelan displacement crisis in international media, including BBC, El País, La Presse, and The Economist. Prof. Freier has provided advice to various international institutions and organizations such as Amnesty International, ICRC, IDB, IOM, UNHCR, the World Bank and the EU. She is Migration Research and Publishing High-Level Adviser of the IOM. One of her recent publications is “Symbolic Refugee Protection: Explaining Latin America’s Liberal Refugee Laws” (with Hammoud-Gallego in American Political Science Review).
Rita Jarrous
Research Associate
Rita conducted interviews with Syrian, Iraqi, and Sudanese refugees in Lebanon for the project 'Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights'. She is currently pursuing a masters degree in Anthropology from the American University of Beirut and works as a junior consultant evaluating humanitarian and development programmes targeting refugees and migrant workers. Her masters thesis looks into Beirut's waste infrastructures with a focus on migrant workers engaged in cleaning and waste management related activities.
Liliana Jubilut
Professor, Post-Graduate Program in Law, Universidade Católica de Santos.
Liliana L. Jubilut holds a PhD and a Master in International Law by Universidade de São Paulo and an LLM in International Legal Studies by NYU School of Law. She was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School and a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Law Initiative (University of London). Currently, she is a Professor at the Post-Graduate Program in Law of Universidade Católica de Santos. She is a Member of IOM’s Migration Research Leaders’ Syndicate and is one of Migration Research and Publishing High-Level Advisers for the same organization. She is also a Member of the Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network (from the Global Compact on Refugees). She has been working with refugees’ issues since 1999.
Laura Lambert
PhD Researcher
Laura Lambert is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. Her PhD focuses on the local reconfigurations of asylum in Niger in the wake of the EU externalization of border controls and refugee protection. This study is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Niamey and Agadez, Niger, in 2018-2019. Her research interests lie in asylum and migration bureaucracies, asylum adjudication, migration regimes and infrastructures. She holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin with a study visit at the New School for Social Research, New York.
Emilie McDonnell
Research Associate
Emilie McDonnell is the UK Advocacy coordinator for Human Rights Watch. Previously she completed a DPhil in Law at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on protecting the right to leave and related human rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants during externalised migration control, specifically when it is conducted extraterritorially and has been outsourced to states of origin and transit, private actors, and international organisations. She holds an MPhil in Law and BCL with Distinction from Oxford, and a Bachelor of Arts (Criminology) and a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours in Law from the University of Tasmania. She is also a qualified lawyer from Australia and co-founded and was a Director of Tasmania’s first community legal centre for refugees, asylum seekers, and humanitarian entrants, the Tasmanian Refugee Legal Service, from 2013-2016.
Alice Nah
Senior Lecturer
Alice M. Nah is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and conducts research on asylum and migration in Asia. Alice has been invited by government and intergovernmental bodies to participate in global policy making and regional dialogues as an independent expert on forced migration in Asia. She chairs the board of the International Detention Coalition and Protection International, and was a founding member of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (serving as chair from 2008-2010). Alice previously held an Endeavour Cheung Kong Research Fellowship at Monash University, Melbourne; the President's Graduate Fellowship at the National University of Singapore; and a visiting fellowship at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University. She holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore.
Watfa Najdi
Research Associate
Watfa conducted fieldwork and interviews with Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Lebanon for the project 'Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights'. She holds a masters degree in urban planning and policy from the American University of Beirut and works as project coordinator and policy researcher at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. Her research focuses on refugees and urban studies; this includes refugee housing, urban inclusion, as well as socioeconomic integration of refugees in host cities.
Samia Qumri
Research Associate
Samia is an academic and practitioner in the humanitarian-development sector with 15 years’ experience working and studying forced migration in the MENA region, with a focus on Jordan. She has worked with different international organisations in programme implementation and for country office emergency preparedness and response.
David N Tshimba
David is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies under auspices of the School Postgraduate Studies and Research, Uganda Martyrs University (UMU) where he is an academic member of the Editorial Committee of the UMU Book Series, among other publication outlets. He facilitates teaching and learning for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the Department of Governance, Peace and International Studies under the School of Arts and Social Sciences. He earned his doctorate (Ph.D.) from the interdisciplinary doctoral programme at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR).
He has undertaken a number of research fellowships, including with the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) on a book project on peace and security in Africa’s Great Lakes region; with the University of Michigan African Presidential Scholars (UMAPS) for his doctoral study on historicising political violence in the Rwenzori region astride the Congo-Uganda border; with the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in partnership with the Irish Human Rights Centre on policy research pertaining to ‘Human Trafficking, Forced Migration and Gender Equality in Uganda’; and with the Action for Development (ACFODE) on an ethnographic research project about violated bodies in forced displacement contexts in Kyaka II Refugee Settlement, western Uganda.
His research interests include (political) violence, (forced) migrations, (social) justice and gender in history, with particular focus on Africa’s Great Lakes region.
Lewis Turner
Lecturer in International Politics of Gender
Dr Lewis Turner is Lecturer in International Politics of Gender at Newcastle University, UK. He is a political ethnographer of humanitarianism in ‘the Middle East’ – particularly Jordan - and his work investigates questions of gender (especially men and masculinities), refugee recognition, vulnerability, labour market integration, and race and racism in humanitarianism. His research on the Syria refugee response has appeared in journals and has received prizes from professional associations including the British International Studies Association and the Political Studies Association. Currently, he is part of the ASILE Project, an EU Horizon2020 funded project investigating the interactions between emerging international protection systems and the United Nations Global Compact for Refugees.
Tamara Wood
Postdoctoral Researcher (external)
Dr Tamara Wood is a Postdoctoral Researcher (external) working on the ‘Recognising Refugees’ strand of ‘Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights’. She is an expert in regional refugee law and regional frameworks for addressing disaster and climate change-related human mobility, with a focus on Africa. She has additional research interests in regional free movement agreements and complementary pathways to protection for refugees. Tamara is a Visiting Fellow at the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Platform on Disaster Displacement, Coordinating Case Law Editor for the International Journal of Refugee Law, and a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London. Tamara has published widely on refugee protection and forced migration issues and acted as a consultant to UNHCR, Platform on Disaster Displacement, Nansen Initiative on Disaster-Induced Cross-Border Displacement, Institute for Security Studies Africa and the World Bank.