The Advisory Board of CMRD

The CMRD is strengthened by an advisory board with individuals renowned locally and internationally for their distinguishing contributions to the arena of migration and development.

Prof. Cathrine Brun

Cathrine Brun is a Professor at Oxford Brookes University. She is the Deputy Director for Research at the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS) and the Director of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP). Cathrine was previously at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) where she taught and researched in the areas of gender, humanitarianism, and displacement due to conflict and disaster. Her main geographical area of study is Sri Lanka where she has researched displacement and recovery. She is a member of the Citizens’ Commission on the Expulsion of Muslims from the Northern Province by the LTTE in 1990. Some recent publications include "Finding a place. Protracted displacement and local integration in Sri Lanka" (Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, 2008), "Spatialising Politics. Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka" (2009) and "Working gender after crisis: partnerships and disconnections in Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami" (2013).

Prof. Ramanie Jayatilaka

Prof. Jayatilaka is an Associate Professor in Sociology (Department of Sociology) and Former Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colombo. She is a Council Member of the National Institute of Social Development, a Board Member of the Centre for Women’s Research, (CENWOR) and Board Member of Sri Lanka Center for Development Facilitation (SLCDF). She has been working in the area of international labour migration since 1998. She was a member of the study group that wrote a report on "Migrant Care Workers" for the Ministry of Education and Scientific Affairs in Japan in 2006. She is a member of the Asia Pacific Migration Net Work. More recently she has been working on Human Trafficking. Prof. Jayatilaka has an M.Phil. from University of Sussex and Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Dr. Nicholas Van Hear

Nicholas Van Hear is an Emeritus Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) in the School of Anthropology (SAME) and St Cross College, University of Oxford. With a background in Anthropology (BA Cambridge), African Studies and Development Studies (PhD Birmingham), he has worked on forced migration, conflict, development, diaspora, transnationalism and related issues, and has field experience in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, North America and Europe. Before joining COMPAS in 2003, he held senior research posts at the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford (1990-2000) and at the Danish Centre for Development Research (now the Danish Institute for International Studies, DIIS) in 2000-2003. He has been a consultant for UNHCR, UNDP, EC, DfID, UK Home Office, UK National Audit Office, Danida, and other international agencies.His books include New Diasporas (UCL Press/Routledge, 1998), The Migration-Development Nexus (International Organisation for Migration, 2003, with Ninna Nyberg Sørensen), and Refugia: radical solutions to mass displacement (Routledge, 2020, with Robin Cohen). His main contributions have been on force and choice in migration; migration and development; diaspora formation and engagement in conflict settings; and migration and class. He continues to explore the interplay between geopolitical shifts, mobility and political mobilisation, as well as pondering mobility futures.

Dr. Kate Bayliss

Dr Kate Bayliss is an Independent Researcher as well as a Research Associate at SOAS University of London and at the University of Sussex. With a background in political economy, she has worked extensively on privatisation, financialisation and social equity, in the UK and the global South. Her focus is on the nature and effects of changing paradigms surrounding private sector engagement in providing essential services, especially health, social care and water. Her work adopts a political economy framing to understand the way that observed outcomes result from the (often contested) relations between agents in the system by which they are provided, which intersects with the context-specific structures and processes. In 2020, with Ben Fine she published A Guide to the Systems of Provision Approach: Who Gets What, How and Why London: Palgrave. From 2020 to 2023 she collaborated with CMRD on the Inclusive Urban Infrastructure Project. Her work has been featured by the BBC, Financial Times and Guardian, among many others.