Consortium

Larissa is the Principal Investigator of the RIAH project. She is Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at The University of Manchester. She is a scholar and practitioner with over two decades of experience at the intersection of research, policy, and practice related to humanitarianism, conflict, and peacebuilding. Her research examines the causes of and responses to violence against conflict interveners, such as aid workers and peacebuilders, the role of data and technology in humanitarian settings, and ways to make intervention more effective, ethical, and responsive to local needs and context.

Professor Karl Blanchet is the Director of the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies, and professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva. He is a Co-Investigator on the RIAH project. Professor Blanchet’s research focuses on resilience issues in global health, specifically in post-conflict and conflict-affected countries. He has developed innovative research approaches based on complexity science and system thinking, and is currently focused on developing and testing people centred methodological approaches for refugee populations in the Middle East.

Leonard Rubenstein is a Co-Investigator on the project. He is a lawyer who has spent his career in human rights, and now focuses particularly on health and human rights, especially the protection of health in armed conflict, and the roles of health professionals in human rights. At Johns Hopkins he is core faculty of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights and the Berman Institute of Bioethics.

Len’s current work includes advancing protection of health facilities, patients, and health workers in situations of conflict, advancing refugee and migrant health and rights, exploring the ethical responsibilities of health professionals to advance human rights including in situations of violent conflict. He is the founder and chairs the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition.

Bertrand is a Co-Investigator on the project. Bertrand is a founding member of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and has been its executive director since 2009.

His research interests are primarily on humanitarianism and humanitarian aid practices. He has published on the history of humanitarian medicine, the history of humanitarian and missionary aid and aid in conflicts. He has worked with MSF-CRASH and MSF Switzerland on issues of risk and attacks on healthcare - his publications in this domain include:

2016, ‘Danger, Risk, Security and Protection: Concepts at the Heart of the History of Humanitarian Aid’, in Fabrice Weissman & Michael Neuman eds, Saving Lives and Staying Alive, Hurst, 2016, 37-53.

2016. Read, Róisín, Bertrand Taithe, and Roger Mac Ginty. "Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology." Third World Quarterly (2016): 1-18.

2014 Caroline Abu Sa’Da, Françoise Duroch, Prof Bertrand Taithe, ‘Des attaques sur la mission médicale : aperçus d’une réalité polymorphe, le cas de Médecins Sans Frontières’, Revue Internationale de la Croix Rouge, International Review of the Red Cross, 95, 890 :309-330.

Christina is the Managing Director of Insecurity Insight. She is also the Founder of the Aid in Danger Project and the Security in Numbers Database (SiND) along with Larissa Fast. Christina oversees the organization of all Insecurity Insight and Aid in Danger projects. Her work is on the use of data for improving and developing human security, with a particular focus on the monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian information generation.

Rohini is an emergency physician with expertise in health and human rights working with us as a Research Fellow. Her work focuses on the protection of human rights in times of complex humanitarian crisis and conflict. She is particularly interested in the protection of health workers and health services. She is adjunct Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and works clinically at in Oakland, California.

Rohini’s research interests include studying the impact of human rights and humanitarian law violations, such as attacks on health, torture, violations of free speech and assembly, and war crimes, on health. She is particularly interested in developing strong research methodology in fragile contexts.

"I have been working on the problem of attacks on health since working to validate a tool to survey attacks on healthworkers in 2011. My work has been to look at the issue from different angles-- epidemiologically, statistically, comparatively, to see where we can make meaningful change."

Dr Read is a Co-Investigator with RIAH. She joined HCRI in 2014 to work on the ESRC Making Peacekeeping Data Work for the International Community Project which focused on the African Union/United Nations mission in Darfur, Sudan (UNAMID). The project included the ethical and political implications of security incident data collection and analysis; the effects of different kinds of data sources qualitative/quantitative) on narratives of conflict; the gendered nature of security data; and the politics of interpretative frames for analysing conflict.

In September 2017, Roisin became a Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies. Her research explores the politics of international interventions in conflict, with a focus on the dynamics of knowledge production and representation. Geographically, Roisin’s research is centred on Sudan and South Sudan. She is also interested in the reform of the humanitarian system, including: the use of technology in humanitarianism; the role of visual representations in humanitarian identity formation; humanitarian security; and international humanitarian non-governmental organisations’ legitimacy.

Courtney is the oral history researcher and archivist for the RIAH (Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare) project. She is currently creating the 'Attacks on Healthcare' collection at the University Library's Humanitarian Archive, constructing an oral history with key actors in the humanitarian healthcare sector about the development of the concept of 'attacks on healthcare' since the 1980s with particular focus on the emergence of various international initiatives on the issue in the early 2000s. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Manchester and more recently a MA in Archives and Records Management from the University of Liverpool.