Experts Database

My academic interests center on the interplay of migration, entrepreneurship, and social change in Africa. This intersection frames my PhD project, investigating Ghanaian returnees’ entrepreneurial pursuits within Accra's creative industry, contextualized by colonial legacies and decolonial aspirations. Guided by the concept of entrepreneuring, encompassing dimensions of emancipation, world making, and belonging, my research explores how entrepreneuring acts as a driver for liberation, reshaping narratives, and facilitating a sense of home and legitimacy.

Dunya Habash is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Through a Woolf Institute Cambridge Scholarship and under the supervision of Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, her ethnographic research with Syrian musicians in Turkey examines the effects of ‘integration’ on music-making and more generally on Syrian cultural practices and imaginaries post-displacement. Dunya is also a PhD Scholar and Outreach Officer at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. She holds undergraduate degrees in Music and History from Birmingham-Southern College (USA), where she embarked on her first substantive project with Syrian forced migrants, a documentary film on Jordan’s largest refugee camp for Syrians, Zaatari: Jordan’s Newest City. That work led her to complete an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford Department of International Development in 2017 and a TEDx talk in Birmingham, AL. Dunya is the daughter of Syrian immigrants to the United States. Her dual background fuels her interest in Middle Eastern culture, identity politics and migration. She is also a classically trained pianist. 

Elena has a decade of experience working on urban migration and refugee issues in the SWANA region. She has conducted ethnographic research in Egypt, Jordan, and Uganda with Darfuri and Congolese refugees and has managed long term projects funded by the DAAD, the European Union, the Embassy of the Netherlands and Dining for Women. She has additional work experience in research, project development, writing, and public speaking. Her research interests include how urban refugees contest border regimes, legal entitlements owed to refugees and asylum seekers, and European border externalization to North Africa. She has been employed as a Senior Researcher at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo since 2018.

Jessica Hagen-Zanker is a Senior Research Fellow leading ODI’s migration research. Jessica coordinates ODI's migration research and leads our contributions to two five-year projects on migration and development, MIGNEX (EC funded) and the GCRF UKRI South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub. Her research focuses on understanding how migration and economic and social policies affect migrant decision-making, impacts of migration on migrants and their families, the interlinkages between migration and social protection, covering a diverse range of countries, including Albania, Ethiopia, Nepal and Jordan. Jessica also has extensive experience in the design and analysis of household surveys, conducting systematic literature reviews and the analysis of social protection programmes and policies. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Maastricht University.

Marloes Hagenaars currently works as a PhD researcher at the Department of Sociology, Ghent University. Specializing in qualitative methods, Marloes is researching the field of cultural diversity in education. In the past Marloes obtained her Master degree in Sociology at Oxford University (2018) and graduated cum laude for her Master degree in Journalism at the University of the Arts (2016).

Brian J. Hall is a Professor of Global Public Health and the Founding Director of the Center for Global Health Equity at NYU Shanghai, Associated Full Professor at the School of Global Public Health, New York University, and an Associate Faculty Member in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Hall has served as a consultant for the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNAIDS, and collaborated with International NGOs to improve the health of diverse populations. Hall led the first community collaborative large-scale mixed-methods study of transnational Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers, which examined the social determinants of diverse health outcomes, including sexual, cardiometabolic, social, and mental health domains.

Hall is currently collaborating with the WHO on the regional framework for mental health in the Western Pacific Region, serving as an advisor on digital mental health. He is also a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission for Mental Health in China. Hall co-developed the Cultural Sections of the ICD-11 Neurological and Psychiatric Conditions and updated and expanded the Cultural material in the DSM-5-TR as a member of the DSM Working group on Culture.

Prof. Hall specialized in epidemiological methods and public health during a two-year NIMH
T32 Fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology in the Department of Mental Health, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHBSPH). In 2013 he moved full-time to China through a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship (UMJT Consortium), hosted by the University of North Carolina Institute of Global Health and Infectious Disease, JHBSPH, and the Sun Yat-sen University School of Public Health.

In 2017 Hall was the inaugural Global Mental Health Fellow of the World Health Organization,
and in 2019 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (D52:
International & D12: Clinical). Hall’s dedication to global health mentoring was recognized by a Faculty Excellence in Advising Award, from the Center for Global Health, at the JHBSPH, also in 2019.

Hall has co-authored more than 320 journal articles, chapters, and other publications, is a highly cited researcher (1% globally, Clarivate Web of Science), received nearly $3million in funding, and seven early career awards, including the Chaim and Bela Danieli Young Professional Award, ISTSS, and the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. He was inducted into Delta Omega Honorary Society for Public Health in 2022.