Experts Database

Gemma Pinyol-Jiménez is Head of Migration Policies and Diversity at Instrategies, a think&do firm, and associate researcher at GRITIM-Pompeu Fabra University. She is also an expert for Intercultural Cities-Council of Europe and coordinator of the RECI-Spanish Network of Intercultural Cities.

She was Head of Cabinet of the Spanish Secretariat of Immigration and Emigration (2010-2012) and Head of the Research Programme on International Migration at CIDOB (2001-2010). She has been involved in several European projects such the C4i-Communication for Integration project lead by the Council of Europe, the European Task Force on Irregular Migration (IFRI, 2009-2011) or the SSH-FP7 TEMPER (Temporary versus Permanent Migration). She has been appointed as an expert for the Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee in different opinions. She graduated from Autonomous University of Barcelona with a BA in Political and Public Administration Sciences and hold a MA in International Relations and a MA in Political Analysis.

Her main areas of interest are the Spanish and EU migration instruments, integration policies and the external dimension of migration policies.

Asya Pisarevskaya is an Assistant Professor of Migration and Diversity at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently she studies migration-related diversities and modes of governance in European cities within the project “Cities of Migration”. Also, she investigates the development of migration studies as a scientific field. Her wider research interests lie in the realm of comparative migration and diversity studies, integration policies and labour market participation of forced migrants.
She was the manager of Horizon 2020-funded project “CrossMigration”, which resulted in creation of this platform www.migrationresearch.com.

Gaby Poblet is an Anthropologist specialized in International Migrations and Public Policies. She holds a PhD in social anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and she is a researcher at the Centre for Migration Studies—EMIGRA (UAB). She is a lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and at the Catalonia Open University (UOC) in Anthropology and Human Evolution. Her teaching includes Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Evolution, Anthropology Applied to public policy and Etnography and Qualitative research methodology at undergraduate and graduate levels.

She is the Ahead of ESM network (Europa Sense Murs, Europe Without Borders) and she has also worked as a consultant in several studies and reports for local governments and ONG's and international organisms such as ACNUR, Unicef, Save the Children, SETEM and European Comission. Her current research focuses on forced migration from Northern Triangle of Central American and endemic violence and she has also worked in several projects in the field of Latino migrations to Spain, migrant domestic workers and gender, family life rights, social integration, inequalities, and citizenship.

Irene Ponzo is the Deputy Director of FIERI. She has a background in political sociology and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Sociological Research from the University of Turin (Italy). Her main research interests concern integration policies and asylum governance, with a prevailing focus on the local level and the multilevel dynamics. She has also extensively worked on migrant and refugee inclusion, paying a specific attention to the effects of economic recessions. She has participated in several EU-funded projects, both research-focused and policy-oriented, and published books and articles with international publishers.

Hannah Pool is a postdoctoral researcher working on the role of money and borders in undocumented migration trajectories at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

Christina Pope is Senior Director of Welcoming International, an initiative of Welcoming America that supports and connects civil society and government institutions advancing inclusion around the world. She addresses emerging needs in the field and provides technical assistance to organizations making local policy, program, and system change to advance migrant inclusion.

Previously, Christina was Senior Network Director at Welcoming America, where she designed programs and strategy for the organization’s US network of local governments and nonprofits. Christina’s background is in community development and international education, including prior roles at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the community-based organization CASA, and the public school system of Recife, Brazil as a Fulbright grantee. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature and American studies from Oberlin College.

More about Welcoming International
Welcoming International is an initiative of Welcoming America consisting of several programs, among them the Welcoming International alliance. The alliance connects and supports peer practitioners for knowledge exchange and collaboration on network strategies, welcoming standards and accreditation programs, and emerging topics in the delivery of services and programs to national networks of inclusion practitioners.

In addition to the alliance, Welcoming America also administers international learning exchanges for local leaders, provides technical assistance to national and local institutions to advance multisector welcoming strategies, and collaborates with global partners to help welcoming localities shape international policy frameworks and narratives for better welcoming infrastructure.