I've spent most of my adult life working on the ground as a protection specialist and mission Head amidst armed conflict with the United Nations (MONUSCO) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in Latin America, Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa. In these roles, I've engaged substantively with communities, weapons-bearers and authorities on complex humanitarian issues, led teams in volatile environments, visited persons deprived of liberty, provided accompaniment to victims/families, and strove to clarify the fate of countless missing persons. 

Over the years, I began to see gaps in how law, the ICRC and other institutions include and empower those most affected by violence. I began to imagine how we can do better. This is what has led me to my current venture: a PhD in Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, where I investigate how and why relatives of the disappeared take up the search -- how they navigate between state and non-state armed governance, how they make sense of their own role and power, and how they move through grief and hope in the process.

Alongside my doctoral research, I advise organizations, agencies, legal teams, and productions on operations in contexts of armed conflict, humanitarian access and negotiation, missing persons and enforced disappearance, strategy and program design, and the political, civil and security dynamics of Colombia, the South Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine, South Sudan, and the DRC. I work in English, French, Spanish and Russian.