Zahir Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University. He obtained his M.A. and D.Phil in Social Anthropology from Sussex University, UK. Dr. Zahir's main areas of interest include development, indigenous knowledge and livelihood. He has published numerous articles both at home and abroad and completed several researches and consultancy reports. He is currently carrying out a World Bank research on Identifying Opportunities to Improve efficiency in Chittagong Port.

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Nasseif Azmy is a social worker and artist, specializing in puppet theater and video documentaries. He lives and works in France and Egypt.

Richard Black is a geographer and Director of the DRC. His work focuses on the study of international migration, including forced migration and post-conflict return, and related social and economic transformations. He is also co-editor of the leading international interdisciplinary journal in refugee studies, the Journal of Refugee Studies, published by Oxford University Press > Sussex profile

Adriana Castaldo is a quantitative researcher specialising in the measurement and the analysis of migration and its links with poverty and development. She is currently a research fellow at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research > Sussex profile

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Katarzyna Grabska (M.A. International Relations, the Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, Washington DC) has been working as a Projects Coordinator and Researcher at the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies program at the American University in Cairo since July 2002. She conducted a study on the livelihood strategies of Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Between December 2004 and April 2006, she was the DRC project coordinator and researcher at AUC carrying out and coordinating research on rights policies of forced migration in Egypt and the Middle East in general. Kasia has experience working in the field of refugees, human rights, and humanitarian assistance in Brussels, Cambodia, Guinea, Vietnam, and Egypt. She was also associate producer in a documentary project on the life of Sudanese refugees in Egypt. As of October 2005, Kasia is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex studying the impact of forced migration on gender relations of returnees and stayees in Southern Sudan.

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Sumaiya Khair is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and an Instructor at the Departmentês Clinical Legal Education Programme. She has a Ph.D. from U.K. and has obtained her LL.B.(Hons.) and LL.M. degrees from the University of Dhaka. She holds executive positions in a couple of University-based research bodies and is also actively associated with other research and advocacy initiatives outside of the University. Her areas of interest and specialisation include human rights, child rights, gender issues and governance. She has written extensively on law, justice and human rights and has to her credit a number of articles and publications in both national and international journals and books. She has also served as a consultant for international and domestic agencies on legal and policy issues.

Russell King is a geographer and co-director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. He has extensive experience of conducting and supervising research on migration, including funded projects on international retirement migration, Albanian migration, and migration and return in West Africa. He is editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies > Sussex profile

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Deeptima Massey is a D Phil student, with a DRC bursary to work within Theme 1 on migration, livelihoods and social protection. She has recently joined the Centre after finishing her MPhil on Hazardous Industries of Delhi from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. She studied the impact of the closure of industry on the livelihoods of industrial owners and workers who were largely immigrants into the city, and their coping strategies after being rendered unemployed. Presently, she is working on internal seasonal migration in rural parts of West Bengal. The main focus of her study will be on migration as social protection by and for migrants, family and kin. She will examine how migration can both lead to, as well as reduce vulnerabilities for migrants and their families. In June 2005, she will carry out ethnographic fieldwork in Murshidabad and Barddhaman districts to study migration from origin, in transit and at the destination.

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Chris Parsons completed his BSc in Economics at Cardiff (University of Wales), and his MSc in Economics and Economic Development at Nottingham University. Chris is specifically interested in matters relating to trade and migration. His MSc thesis used a gravity model to investigate the impact of increased immigration from the EU accession countries on western EU bilateral trade flows. Chris's research interests also include poverty, inequality and the changing patterns of aid flows.

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Reem Saad is a social anthropologist working at the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo. Her areas of interest are rural society, public culture and ethnographic film.

Sarah Sadek (B.A, Political Science, AUC) is the Research Assistant with the FMRS/DRC Project. Her previous experiences include assistantship at the East Awards Department of the International Population Council in Egypt. Before joing FMRS, Sarah worked as Assistant Program Officer in the International Relations Department of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Janet Seeley is a social anthropologist at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia with current research interests in livelihood approaches to rural poverty reduction and gender and development.
Janet Seeleyês migration research interests focus on the role internal migration plays in poor peopleês livelihoods, including creating links between livelihoods approaches and health interventions and social protection, to more effectively reach different disadvantaged groups. She is particularly interested in female migration and has recently been looking at issues to do with women and girlsê migration in both Bangladesh and Southern India. She is also interested in the interface between migration and HIV/AIDS impact mitigation. As a consultant with UEAês Overseas Development Group she continues to work with rural livelihoods projects in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India and has recently undertaken research on gender-specific aspects of HIV/AIDS impact mitigation and rural livelihoods in Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and India > Profile

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Tasneem Siddiqui is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Dhaka. Dr Siddiqui has recently written extensively on migration and gender issues in Bangladesh and recently edited a collection on 'Streamlining the labour recruitment process in Bangladesh.

Mohammad is currently Senior Research Associate of the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), an affiliate of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has a MA in Development Studies from the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds, UK. Mohammad completed his MSS in International Relations in 2002 and BSS (Hons) in International Relations in 2000 from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His primary research interests include voluntary and involuntary migration including trafficking, refugee situations, informal border trade, human rights and rural development. He has published a monograph and recently an article on livelihoods and informal trade at the Bangladesh border in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies published by Routledge. He is involved in various research projects and has presented papers in national and international workshops, conferences and seminars in Bangladesh, Spain and India.

Ron Skeldon is a geographer and demographer with a long experience of research on migration issues in developing countries. He has helped produce methodologies for survey design on child labour in the Asian region for ILO. Aside his teaching at the University of Sussex he also has a Visiting Professorship at the University of Singapore and a range of external research activities.
> Sussex profile

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Jaber is an anthropologist, and an independent researcher working in Lebanon. He was visiting research fellow at the Refugee Studies Program, University of Oxford over 1997-98 and has authored several articles and studies dealing with Palestinian refugees and the right of return. He is an activist in the ROR movement and the coordinator of 'A'idun Group' in Lebanon. Currently, Jaber is acting as project assistant for suveys in Lebanon and Syria for a UNRWA -IUED (Geneva University)/ UCL (Louvain Universiy) joint socio-economic survey of Palestinian refugees across the Agency's five fields of operation.

Dorte Thorsen recently received a DPhil in African Studies from Universityof Sussex. She has carried out interdisciplinary research in the Bisaregion in south-eastern Burkina Faso since 1997. Her doctoral research focused on rural women's everyday lives, household economy, decision-making and the countless ways in which women pursue their preferences, and involved long-term ethnographic research that also gave detailed insights into intergenerational relationships. In her postdoctoral research project, she returned to work with children and youth in a project on children's independent migration, their livelihood experiences and their objectives when seeking wage labour. Earlier she had worked with forced migrants in this age group in asylum seeker centres run by the Danish Red Cross in Denmark. In November 2005 Dorte Thorsen joined the Nordic Africa Institute where she continues her research with young migrants.

Samira Trad, MA International Relations (University of Southern California): Licence de droit (Robert Schuman University, Strasbourg). Founder and Director of ACSRA and Frontiers Lebanese non-governmental organisations working on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers. Worked for many years as a researcher with Amnesty International (IS-London) and the international Institute for Human Rights (Strasbourg).

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Terrie Walmsley is Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Global Trade Analysis at Purdue University. Her research interests include international trade, capital and labour mobility and CGE modeling. Terrie is involved in a number of projects including beaming the impact of an FTA between the EU and South Africa. She also works with the Dynamic GTAP model, having examined China's accession to the WTO and developed a base case scenario for use with the model > Personal profile

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> Sussex profile

Ann Whitehead is the coordinator of all work under theme 1. She is an anthropologist with a long term interest in socioeconomic and agrarian change and a specialist in gender and development issues. She has written widely on gender and poverty issues in Africa, with a more recent focus on women and land tenure. She has undertaken long term empirical work in Ghana in communities with high levels of long term labour migration and has published work on socioeconomic change and poverty, household livelihood strategies and inter-generational and gender relations in that area. She has also acted as adviser on gender, poverty and development for the World Bank, UNCTAD and UNRISD > Sussex profile

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Alan Winters is an economist and a former Division Chief at the World Bank. He has published widely on trade and trade policy and more recently on the impact of trade on poverty, and is currently working on a DFID-funded project analysing the consequences of migration of talent for developing countries > Sussex profile

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Ayman Zohry is visiting Assistant Professor of Demography at the Faculty of Health Sciences of the American University of Beirut (AUB). His research interests are labour force issues and labour migration including demographic analysis; environment, population and development; fertility, family planning, and reproductive health; and medical demography and population health > AUB profile