Laura Hammond

Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Professor of Development Studies at SOAS

Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

PhD in Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

She has been conducting research on conflict, food security, refugees, migration and diasporas in and from the Horn of Africa since the early 1990s. She lived in Ethiopia from 1993-2000, conducting research and working for the UN Emergencies Unit for Ethiopia (the precursor to UNOCHA). Among her research activities, she is PI of the Impact Acceleration Account on Migration, Displacement, Minorities and Marginalisation.

She is also Co-Director of the Work Package on Poverty and Inequalities for the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Research Hub on South-South Migration. She is Team Leader of the EU Trust Fund’s Research and Evidence Facility on migration and conflict in the Horn of Africa, and Team Leader of the London International Development Centre's Migration Leadership Team. She has done consultancy for a wide range of development and humanitarian organisations, including UNDP, USAID, Oxfam, Medécins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme.

She is the author of ‘This Place Will Become Home: Refugee Repatriation to Ethiopia’ (Cornell University Press: 2004), editor (with Christopher Cramer and Johan Pottier of Researching Violence in Africa: Ethical and Methodological Challenges [Brill 2011] and several book and journal articles.