COMPAS - Key Persons
Ana is a DPhil student in Migration Studies, researching the long-term impacts of immigration on the educational outcomes of natives. For her doctoral project, she focuses on immigration in the United States, using mixed methods to determine whether there are significant differences in the long-term educational attainment of natives who completed their early education in environments with high immigrant concentrations, and those who did not.
Before Oxford, she worked with IOM, the UN migration agency, evaluating the living conditions and needs of migrants on the US-Mexico border. Ana has also completed an MSc in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, during which she explored the aspiration and expectation-building processes of Central American immigrants en-route to the U.S.
Job Titles:
- Trust / Esmee Fairbairn Foundation / Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
Job Titles:
- Researcher at the Migration Observatory
- Researcher, the Migration Obervatory
Ben Brindle is a Researcher at the Migration Observatory. His research interests include net migration, the economic impacts of migration, work visas and other visa policies.
Previously, Ben worked in the Migration Research Division at the International Organisation for Migration, where he supported the preparation of research papers and reports for publication on various migration topics. These include the Covid-19 Analytical Snapshot Series, the Migration Research Series, and the 2022 iteration of the World Migration Report.
In 2022, Ben completed his PhD at the University of Brighton, which explored how the UK labour market responded to immigration in the decade following the financial crisis. Specifically, it examined whether immigration induced firms to locate their production activities in the UK (as opposed to overseas) or change their production methods (and use more labour-intensive techniques).
Bhawani Buswala is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the PEAK Urban Programme.
He completed his PhD in Anthropology at Brown University in 2016. He was the Singh Postdoctoral Associate in the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University in 2016-17. His principal research interests include social inequality, caste, development, migration, urbanization, urban poverty, discrimination and stigma, dignity, and the state and citizenship. He explores these questions through ethnographic data on informal settlements, informal work, spatial segregation, food politics, everyday lived experiences, and claims on the state. His ethnographic fieldwork is situated in India.
Before earning his PhD in the US, he was trained in critical research and methodologies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), completing an MPhil in Sociology and an MA in International Politics. He is also a qualified Chemical Engineer.
Delphine is the COMPAS Communications Officer, providing support to COMPAS research and projects, including long-standing initiatives such as the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity and the Migration Observatory. She previously worked in volunteer promotion at the British Red Cross.
Delphine holds a MSc in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, jointly with the Oxford Department of International Development and the School of Anthropology. Her dissertation examined soundscapes and the sensory experience of music within the Indian diaspora in the UK. Delphine was the co-Secretary for the Oxford Migration Studies Society, co-organizing the annual Oxford Migration Conference in 2022. She holds a BA in Music at the University of Bristol, supervised by Dr Florian Scheding.
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow
- Emeritus Fellow
Dr Sarah Spencer is a Senior Fellow at COMPAS, where she was Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity from its inception in 2014 until March 2019. She is a former Deputy Director of COMPAS and, from 2018-2022, was Chair of the Board of Directors of IMISCOE, the International Migration Research Network.
Sarah's research and publications focus on migrants with an irregular status, including currently, as PI on Local Responses to Precarious Migrants: Frames, Strategies and Evolving Practices in Europe (LoReMi); on integration, human rights and equality issues. Sarah was awarded her doctorate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, has an MPhil from University College London, and took her first degree at the University of Nottingham.
At the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, Sarah was the Director of its Autumn Academy symposium from 2016-2018. She was responsible for its award-winning online tool to assess the eligibility of migrant families for local authority support. Until September 2021, Sarah was Co-Director of the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE) with Nicola Delvino, with whom she won a 2021 Excellence in Impact Award. Before Oxford, Sarah was Chair of the national network of equality organisations, the Equality and Diversity Forum; Deputy Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality; and Director of Liberty.
Job Titles:
- Expert
- Research Affiliate, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity
Dr. Zach Bastick is an expert on digital migration studies and digital politics. His research focuses on how technology empowers and disempowers, and how it might better serve communities and marginalized populations. At Oxford, he is investigating the digital exclusion of irregular migrants, including their attitudes towards technology and exposure to misinformation. He is also analysing how municipalities respond to the presence of irregular migrants from the perspectives of technology, social services, and multi-level governance. Dr. Bastick has held positions at Harvard University, the European University Institute, the Sorbonne University, UC Berkeley, and Sciences Po Paris, among other institutions.
Gilda is a DPhil student in Migration Studies analysing the entrepreneurial behaviour of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey. With a background in economic migration and labour economics, Gilda became interested in forced migration research while working on urban refugees in the Middle East for the Centre for Mediterranean Integration (CMI). Now working for the World Bank on private sector practices for refugee inclusion, Gilda manages to juggle work with research thanks to her passion for the analysis of forced migration. Gilda is particularly interested in researching the behaviour of refugee entrepreneurs in firm creation and management as well as the main pattern of entrepreneurship in resource-constrained and adverse environments using both quantitative and qualitative lenses.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Global Exchange
- Director, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity Co - Director
- Research Member of Kellogg College Oxford
Jacqui is the Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, the knowledge exchange arm of COMPAS, where she manages a broad portfolio of knowledge exchange and research projects which aim to extend and deepen COMPAS's international contribution to the reciprocal sharing of expertise and ideas among academics, policymakers, professionals, civil society, lawyers, foundations, school students and others in the field. Jacqui's work focuses on local government and migration, integration and inclusion and how place-based narratives can facilitate the development of inclusive communities.
Jacqui is a Research Member of Kellogg College Oxford's most extensive and international graduate college and sits on the Departmental Research Ethics Committee (DREC) for the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and the Central University Ethics Committee (CUREC). From 2018-2020, Jacqui acted as the UK coordinator for the European Website on Social Integration.
As a Senior Researcher at the Global Exchange from March 2017-March 2019, she led the first phase of the Inclusive Cities programme - supporting 6 UK cities and their local partners to achieve a step-change in their approach towards integration of newcomers in the city, including through a learning exchange with Welcoming America.
Before this, Jacqui managed the Refugee and Migrant Team at Islington Council, providing social services support to families and vulnerable adults with No Recourse to Public Funds, designing and managing the council's contribution to the Syrian Vulnerable Person's Resettlement Scheme and delivering training to social workers on behalf of the NRPF Network. In 2016, she received a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to travel to cities in the United States and Italy to understand how cities can better integrate migrants. In 2020 she joined the Franco-British Young Leaders Programme. In addition, Jacqui is a trustee of the Justice Together Initiative, which aims to ensure that people who use the UK immigration system can access justice and thrive.
Jacqui is an alumnus of the National Graduate Development Programme for Local Government (NGDP) and the Teach First Programme. She holds an MSc in Public Management and Leadership from Warwick Business School and a BA in French and Italian Studies from the University of Warwick.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Researcher, MIGNEX & MORE
José Ignacio Carrasco (PhD, Pompeu Fabra University - UPF) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Before moving to Oxford in 2023, Ignacio was a doctoral student at UPF, where he used various quantitative methods and social simulation to work on three interconnected areas of migration research: labour market integration of Intraregional migrants, the dynamics of remittance behaviour and the underpinning mechanisms of emigration rates. He has previously worked at the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Practice Group and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), addressing migration, social development, malnutrition, and child labour issues.
He is working on the MIGNEX (Aligning Migration Management and the Migration-Development Nexus) and MORE (Motivations, Experiences and Consequences of Returns and Readmissions Policy: Revealing and Developing Effective Alternatives) projects. In the MIGNEX project, he is researching the working packages on the causes and consequences of migration. Specifically, he conducts Natural Language Processing (NLP) of bibliometric data on academic literature related to Root Causes of Migration. He is also working on identifying the virtuous mechanisms underlying the migration-development-nexus. In the MORE project, he will research the working package for analysing the political and economic motivations, media discourses and approaches to Returns and Readmissions (RR) Policy.
Ignacio holds a Master of Science in Demography from Stockholm University, a Master in Migration Management from Pompeu Fabra University, and a degree in Sociology from the University of Chile. He is an affiliate at the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research (MPIDR) Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Well-Being.
Job Titles:
- Researcher at the Global Exchange
- Researcher, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity
Lucy is a Researcher at the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, on a research and knowledge exchange project focussed on the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) immigration condition and social services provision for those at risk of destitution. Lucy also works on the Measuring Irregular Migration (MIrreM) project, exploring strategic approaches to regularisation for undocumented migrants in Europe. Her research interests include migration, poverty, inequality, sociology of childhood, children's rights, participatory methodologies and co-production.
Lucy has worked in the migration and children's sector since 2003 in various roles, including as a researcher, frontline practitioner, service manager and policy adviser. Her background is in frontline practice with migrant children, young people and families, and she set up and managed the award-winning Rise project, a specialist service for migrant boys and young men trafficked into the UK. Before joining COMPAS, she worked at UCL on the Children Caring on the Move research project with a team of peer researchers using participatory methods to explore separated children and young people's experiences of care. She also worked as a policy and practice adviser for migrant children and families at The Children's Society, leading the organisation's policy and research work on immigration issues. Lucy has a BA in Anthropology and Geography and a MA in the Sociology of Childhood and Children's Rights from UCL, where she focussed on migrant children and young people's rights in the UK.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Migration Observatory
- Director, the Migration Observatory Co - Director
- Member of the Migration Advisory Committee
Madeleine Sumption is the Director of the Migration Observatory, which provides evidence-based analysis of migration in the UK. Madeleine is a policy specialist focusing on the impacts of migration policies and the role of migrants in the labour market.
Madeleine's research interests include the design of immigration policies and their economic and social impacts, labour migration, and the interaction between the economics and politics of migration policies. Recent focus areas include government policies towards immigrant investors, the impacts of Brexit on the UK's immigration system, and the implementation of the EU Settlement Scheme.
Madeleine is a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, an independent panel that advises the UK Government on migration issues. From 2017 to 2022, she was Chair of the Migration Statistics User Forum, which brings together producers and users of migration data. Before joining Oxford, Madeleine was Director of Research for the international program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in Washington, DC. She remains a Non-resident Fellow with Migration Policy Institute Europe. Madeleine holds a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Maastricht. In 2017, she received an MBE for services to social science.
Madeleine is available for collaboration with early-career researchers working on immigration policy and its impacts in the UK and overseas.
Dr. Marie Mallet-Garcia (Ph.D., Paris-Sorbonne, 2013) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. She is part of the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE), where she guides cities on exchanging knowledge on local practices and policies responding to the presence of irregular migrants. She was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and a EURIAS fellow at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies, Casa de Velazquez.
She is an expert on the inclusion of undocumented migrants and has led research projects at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University to comparatively analyze transatlantic migration policies affecting undocumented migrants. Most recently, she has investigated the effects of COVID-19 on undocumented immigrants in Europe and the United States. Her current focus aims to identify and alleviate obstacles faced by non-EU migrants in accessing basic services, and to improve their social inclusion.
Job Titles:
- Director of the PEAK Urban Research
- Professor and Director of PEAK Urban
Michael Keith is the Director of the PEAK Urban Research programme. Until October 2019, he was the Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford (seconded until 2024). He was, until 2021, co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The Economic and Social Research Council portfolio of investments and research on cities) and is the Co-Director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. He is also a Co-Investigator of the Open City research project.
His research focuses on migration-related processes of urban change. His most recent works include ‘Urban Transformations and Public Health in the Emergent City', and African Cities and Collaborative Futures, both published by Manchester University Press and The Unfinished Politics of Race, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
He has experience outside the academy working in the community and voluntary sector and as a politician for twenty years in the East End of London, leader of a London local authority and founder, chair and board member of a wide range of urban regeneration companies and public/private partnerships. He also has several decades of experience in the voluntary sector, initially in organisations focusing on racism and the criminal justice system and more recently as the co-founder and chair of the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, the largest multicultural arts centre in the UK.
- ‘From an ‘infrastructural turn' to the platform logics of logistics (Michael Keith with Andreza de Souza Santos)
Guan, C., Keith, M., & Hong, A. (2020) Designing walkable cities and neighborhoods in the era of urban big data, Urban Planning International 01 Jan 2020, DOI:10.22217/upi.2019.389
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Researcher
- Research Affiliate
Nicola Delvino is a Researcher/Advisor on Migrants and Refugees Rights at Amnesty International.
While working at COMPAS, University of Oxford (2017-2021), Nicola co-directed the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE) and was a Senior Researcher at the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity. Nicola continues to support the C-MISE initiative as a member of its steering group and a COMPAS research affiliate. Nicola's research focused on EU and national laws and policies on irregular migration and local practices responding to migrants with irregular status. It led the Safe Reporting project, researching laws and policies allowing crime reporting by victims of crime with irregular migration status in Europe and the USA.
Nicola has been working as a Human Rights Consultant for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) - Regional Office for Europe (Brussels) and has been cooperating as a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California - Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco). Before joining COMPAS, Nicola worked and researched asylum, migration and human rights policies in Europe for Brussels-based NGOs, in particular as the Executive Officer on Asylum and Migration of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office (2014-2015). He worked as a Justice & Home Affairs Officer in the political section of the British Embassy in Rome (2016-2017). Nicola holds a Master's in Law from the University of Bari (Italy) and studied EU law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles - ULB (Belgium).
Job Titles:
- Professor in Migration Studies
- Professor of Migration Studies
Carlos Vargas-Silva is Professor of Migration Studies and a Fellow of Kellogg College. He has a joint appointment between the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), based at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, and the Oxford Department for International Development.
Carlos was Director of COMPAS from October 2019 to September 2023, and was the (founding) Director of the DPhil in Migration Studies at Oxford from October 2018 to September 2023. He is a co-founder of the journal Migration Studies, published by Oxford University Press, and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal from 2020 to 2023.
The overarching theme of his research is the interaction of migration with labour markets, public services, and health outcomes, with a key focus on the role of policy in affecting those interactions. An important contribution of his work has been the application of concepts from economics to conceptualise migration decisions and the impacts of migration on host communities in the forced migration context. Bringing additional insights from other social sciences, he has developed conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to investigate the evidence in this context.
Carlos teaches in the MSc in Migration Studies and the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at Oxford. He also supervises doctoral students interested in migration (in intersection with labour markets, development, and/or public policy) and welcomes new potential DPhil students interested in these areas. He also works with a vibrant group of post-doctoral fellows and is available for collaboration with early career researchers who want to consolidate their research in these topics.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Deputy Director and Head of Media and Communications at the Migration Observatory
- Researcher and Deputy Director, the Migration Observatory
Rob McNeil is a Researcher for COMPAS examining the social environments from which news stories and narratives about migration and migrants emerge; how media debate affects migration policy decisions (and vice versa); and how information gaps affect the way these issues are discussed. He lectures on migration and the media for the MSc in Migration Studies.
Rob is also the Deputy Director and Head of Media and Communications at the Migration Observatory. He was part of the team who launched the Migration Observatory in 2011 and, since then, has been working to embed Migration Observatory analysis in public debates. He is responsible for public relations strategy, parliamentary and community outreach and news and commentary work.
Rob is a former journalist and joined COMPAS in November 2010 after two years as the Media Director for the US environmental organisation Conservation International. Previously he worked as PR manager for Oxfam GB, Senior Press Officer for WWF-UK and as a journalist for a range of publications including the Evening Standard, The Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, Red, Time Out and BBC Wildlife.
Rose is a DPhil student in Migration Studies based at COMPAS. Her research interests centre around the social and creative affordances of music-making by displaced people. Rose's DPhil project works with forced migrants in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, in a variety of institutional and artistic contexts. Primarily, she is interested in the role of state-funded music programmes and how they interact within Germany's migrant integration policies. Rose's project uses participatory action research methodologies in which community stakeholders take on co-researchers role in producing knowledge. She is funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and the Keble College Sloane Robinson Scholarship.
Rose holds an MPhil in Musicology from Oxford and BAs in History and Music from the University of Southern California. Most recently, Rose was a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Roxana is a DPhil candidate in Migration Studies. Her research is focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in immigration and border governance, with a focus on Canada. For her doctoral project, Roxana employs a mixed method qualitative approach that will rely on relevant official documents and academic literature on the use of AI in governance as well as ethnographic data involving in-depth interviews with network actors and experts.
Prior to joining the DPhil, Roxana completed a MSc in Migration Studies at Oxford, and a MA and BA in Political Studies in Canada.
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist working on migration, borders and security with a focus on the West African Sahel and southern Europe. His book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (University of California Press 2014), an ethnographic account of European efforts to halt irregular migration, accompanies border agencies, aid organisations and migrants along the Spanish-African borders. The book shows how the ‘fight against irregular migration' has fuelled distress and drama at the borders, which in turns has led to the expansion of a self-reinforcing industry of controls.
Ruben's latest book is No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (University of California Press 2019). This book builds on Ruben's more recent research, financed by the AXA Research Fund, and looks comparatively at remote-controlled interventions and the selective withdrawal of international actors from global 'crisis zones'. Taking as its starting point the conflict in Mali in the West African Sahel, it explores how the mapping of danger, the perception of risk and the politics of fear have all contributed to framing and fuelling security, aid and border interventions in the Sahel as well as in other settings such as Somalia, Libya and Afghanistan.
Besides his academic output, Ruben frequently engages with wider audiences, for instance via reports on borders and security and commentary in the media.
Prior to joining ODID, Ruben worked at the London School of Economics and at Stockholm University, where he remains an associated researcher. He welcomes prospective doctoral projects including on innovative anthropological or interdisciplinary approaches to security, risk and human mobility.
Vittorio Bruni is a DPhil student in Migration Studies and a Grand Union DTP Scholar with an Advanced Quantitative Methods award. He has a strong interest in human migration and the various themes that intersect with it. His DPhil research investigates vulnerabilities to human trafficking and exploitation in the context of labour migration from Myanmar to Thailand.
Vittorio holds a BA in Development Economics and International Cooperation, and a MSc in Public Policy, Human Development, and Migration Studies. After finishing his studies, Vittorio worked for the United Nation University - Merit as a research officer. In this position, he mostly focussed on migration routes from West Africa to Europe, and on the intersections between gender, migration, and corruption. Later he joined the Regional Office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Bangkok, Thailand where he was part of a regional project looking at migration and displacement in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Vittorio later took up a position as the IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) coordinator for Thailand and Laos PDR, conducting quantitative primary research activities on labour migration in these countries. In his latest position, Vittorio was the Lead International Research Consultant for a research project on stranded migrants and returnees implemented by the DTM unit of IOM in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, and Tajikistan.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Research Associate, Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After ( Post ) Socialism
Volodymyr Artiukh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at COMPAS with the ERC-funded project EMPTINESS: Living Capitalism and Democracy after (Post)Socialism.
Volodymyr completed his PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in 2020. His dissertation is a historically informed analysis of labour in Belarus centred on workers' agency in the context of bureaucratic labour control. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation. He also wrote on the circulation of populist idioms in Belarus's dominant and opposition ideologies in 2017-20.
Within the EMPTINESS project, Volodymyr studies migration in the context of war-induced destruction in Ukraine. His project situates their laboural and migratory experiences in Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova's changing political and economic situations.
His research interests include the anthropology of work and labour organisations in post-Soviet countries, the anthropology of populism, and the comparative study of hegemonic practices in Eastern Europe.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Research Affiliate
Will Allen is a Researcher at COMPAS, working with the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at the University of Oxford. His research areas are in political communication and public opinion, particularly how media relate to immigration attitudes and policymaking. Currently, he is focusing on data visualisations about migration and mobility as brokered outputs that relate to public perceptions and political behaviour. He is also developing theories of knowledge exchange among migration researchers and the wider public, in order to inform more effective practice.
From 2012 to 2018 he was a Research Officer with the Migration Observatory, also at COMPAS, where he developed and led research on British media coverage about migration issues and specific migrant groups. He also continues to hold interests in how technologies and large-scale data collection relate to human mobility and policymaking.