Experts Database

Xóchitl Bada is an Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement and coedited The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, Accountability Across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America, and The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration. She is co-author of Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power (University of California Press, 2023)

Ciprian Badescu studied business and sociology, obtaining a doctorate in sociology of organizations, followed by a post-doctorate in sociology of culture, cultural economy and social economics at the Romanian Academy. His more recent work includes participating in a two-year research project on improving research infrastructure on social assistance in low- and middle-income countries, completed at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.

Badre is a policy development expert, based in Germany. His research seeks to analyze current norms that hamper the progress and livelihood of migrants, women, and youth as social groups; and aims at generating evidence-based recommendations that could inform national and regional policies, providing comparable data across borders on key countries in the Southern Mediterranean Neighborhood. He worked for a number of international organizations (Fulbright, EU-JRC, ERASMUS+, InterAcademy Partnership, Konrad-Adenaeur Foundation, Global Young Academy, Next Einstein Forum, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, ECSA Global, and Arab Council for Social Sciences, American Political Sciences Association, MAJALAT Consortium; Réseau Euromed France REF; and EDU4U. He has also served as visiting professor & research fellow at Alfred University in New York, Monterey Institute for International Studies in California, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Aalborg University in Denmark, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, and Babes Bolyai University in Romania. He is the editor of Social Science Section for ELSAVIER & Scientific African Journal. His recent publications include: North-South Economic Diplomacy: EU-Morocco Free Trade Negotiation (Germany, November 2020); & Voices of Early Career Researchers in and out of the Academy: A Pan- African Perspective (Germany May 2020). Currently, he is a coordinator and author the EuroMeSCo Joint Study Group 2021: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: A Comparative Perspective on Maghreb Countries Migration Cooperation with their West African Neighbours.

Psychologist, PhD candidate in migration in the Comillas Pontifical University

Ahmed Bakry is an architect and urban planner. He got his BSc from Ain Shams University, urban planning and design department (UPD) July 2012. His accumulative ranking was the first upon his colleagues. He then joined the integrated urbanism and sustainable deign master’s program (IUSD), which is a double master’s degree between Ain Shams University and Stuttgart University between 2013 and 2015. During this time he started his work on integrating local ethnic groups in the process of regional planning and bridging the gap between government, planners (practitioners), academia and society.
Bakry began his practical work while he was studying, by participating in several urban competitions. He worked as a freelancer for some architectural, interior, and urban projects. Bakry participated in several student exchange programs related to urbanism and future developments. He attended several conferences and workshops regarding sustainable urbanism and contemporary planning in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Egypt, Canada and U.S. Between 2016 and 2019 he worked as lecturer assistant at UPD, and as researcher at IUSD Cairo in various research projects, all related to regional planning and regional governance.
Bakry started to work on his PhD at the Institute of Geography in April 2019. His research is funded by the Higher ministry of education in Cairo MHESR and the DAAD respectively. In his PhD he is trying to tackle the regional developmental inequalities in the global south for the border regions. His work is based on theories of regional planning, peripheral regions, and cross-border communities. By comparing the South Egyptian border region with EU border areas, he aims do develop an analytical framework that enables a better understanding of planning processes in cross-border regions.

Marie-Clare Balaam is a senior research associate in the Research in Childbirth and Health Unit (REACH) at UCLan. Her current research focuses on maternity care and social support for marginalised women with a particular focus on migrant women’s experiences of maternity care and childbirth in the UK and Europe.

Jay Balagna (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in the Community-Partnered Policy and Action stream at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at RAND. His research interests include disaster studies, disaster risk reduction and creation, the influence of climate change on disasters, climate-related and post-disaster migration, and the social determinants of health.

Prior to joining Pardee RAND, Balagna was a wildland firefighter in Nevada and Montana, an emergency medical technician in Los Angeles, and a political journalist working in the United States and Chile. He has an M.P.H. from Emory University and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Former Director, Mediterranean Migration Observatory;
External Expert/ External Researcher, Danube University, Krems;
External Expert, ICMPD;
Expert and Expert Evaluator, DG Migration and H2020, European Commission.