Leadership and Impact

Elena’s work extends beyond research and publication to the development of institutions, partnerships, research infrastructures and wider responses to displacement. Her leadership brings together scholarship, education, humanitarian and policy engagement, with a particular emphasis on building collaborative structures through which research can inform institutional practice and public debate.

Across these activities, Elena has worked to strengthen refugee-centred and community-engaged approaches, develop more ethical and equitable forms of knowledge production, and create sustained connections between research, education, policy and practice.

Research Leadership

Elena has built and led major international research programmes on migration, displacement, refuge, humanitarianism and social justice, securing more than £3 million in competitive research funding, including major awards from the European Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. These programmes - alongside projects funded by the British Council, UNHCR, and a range of pump-priming grants - have brought together researchers and partners across countries and disciplines while creating long-term collaborations with universities, humanitarian organisations and communities.

As Founding Director of the Refuge in a Moving World initiative, Editor-in-Chief of the Migration and Society journal and, from 2015 to 2024, Co-Director of UCL’s Migration Research Unit, she has also helped build interdisciplinary research communities, support collaborative research and create platforms through which new partnerships and research agendas can develop.

Building Institutions and Partnerships

A defining strand of Elena’s leadership has been building structures through which people and institutions can work together over the longer term. Her international partnerships span research, curriculum development, educational strategy, humanitarian dialogue and institutional collaboration, including long-standing work with the South-South Forum at Dartmouth College (USA) and Université Saint-Joseph (USJ) in Beirut (Lebanon), and her ongoing work with the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS) at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (Qatar). She is Distinguished Visiting Professor at USJ and Senior Advisor and Non-Resident Fellow at CHS.

At UCL, she is Academic Co-Chair of the University of Sanctuary Working Group and helped lead the institutional work contributing to UCL’s successful accreditation as a University of Sanctuary. This work connects educational access and inclusion with the wider question of how universities respond institutionally to displacement and conflict.

Shaping Fields and Research Agendas

Elena’s intellectual leadership extends beyond her own research through editing, convening and the creation of spaces for scholarship. As Editor-in-Chief and Founding Co-Editor of Migration and Society, she contributes to shaping international conversations about migration and displacement while supporting dialogue across disciplines, geographical contexts and generations of scholars.

Her editorial leadership also includes major international Handbooks spanning refugee and forced migration studies, South-South relations, and religion and contemporary migration. Across these activities, she has made influential contributions to fields of inquiry around refugee-refugee relations, Southern-led responses to displacement, religion and humanitarianism, refuge and hospitality, and collaborative approaches to knowledge production.

Ethics, Sanctuary and Institutional Change

Elena’s institutional leadership connects research expertise with questions of ethics, inclusion and institutional responsibility. As Deputy Chair of UCL’s Humanities, Arts and Sciences Research Ethics Committee and a member of the UCL Research Ethics Committee, she contributes to institutional approaches to ethically complex research, including research involving conflict, displacement, trauma and high-risk environments.

Alongside her University of Sanctuary leadership, this work forms part of a broader concern with how universities respond to displacement and conflict through research practice, education, student support and institutional policy. Her work in this area increasingly connects sanctuary with trauma-informed education and wider questions of institutional responsibility.

Policy and Humanitarian Impact

Elena has a sustained record of bringing research into dialogue with policy and humanitarian practice. She has served on national strategic advisory bodies for research and government, undertaken commissioned policy research and consultancy, briefed policymakers and contributed to international discussions on refugee protection, humanitarianism and displacement. Her longstanding engagement with UNHCR has included contributions to high-level policy discussions and research-policy exchange. Elena’s research has travelled widely through policy and practitioner communities.

Public and Cultural Engagement

Elena’s work also brings scholarship into conversation with museums, literature, photography and other forms of creative and public practice. She has led and contributed to exhibitions, artistic collaborations, public events, festivals, podcasts, media engagements, and creative research initiatives that bring academic research into dialogue with wider audiences.

She contributed research and expertise to the Imperial War Museum’s Refugees: Forced to Flee exhibition, while collaborations including The Southern Eye and The Camp as Archive bring questions of displacement into dialogue with photography, writing, archives and representation.

Elena’s contribution to public engagement has been recognised by UCL’s Provost’s Established Career Award for Public Engagement, awarded for her contribution to UCL-wide engagement relating to refugees and displaced people and the impact of her research on humanitarian policy and practice.

Selected Recognition

Fellow, Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), 2026

Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), 2026

UCL Provost’s Established Career Award for Public Engagement, 2018

Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2015

Lisa Gilad Prize, International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, 2012