Our People
Director
Professor Michelle Foster
Michelle Foster is a Professor and Director of the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. Elected in 2022 as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, Michelle is a leading international authority on refugee law, human rights and statelessness. Her key publications include International Refugee Law and Socio-Economic Rights: Refuge from Deprivation (CUP, 2007, Winner of the University of Melbourne’s Woodward Medal), with James C. Hathaway, The Law of Refugee Status, Second Edition, (CUP 2014), with Hélène Lambert, International Refugee Law and the Protection of Stateless Persons (OUP 2019) and with Cathryn Costello and Jane McAdam, The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law (OUP 2021). Michelle teaches Refugee Law and International Refugee Law at Melbourne Law School, and directs the annual Statelessness Intensive Course at Melbourne Law School. She is a recipient of the University of Melbourne’s Barbara Falk Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Michelle has undertaken consultancy work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and training of refugee tribunal members in New Zealand and Australia. She is Founder and Editor in Chief (with Laura van Waas) of the Statelessness and Citizenship Review. Michelle is also an Advisory Board Member of the Melbourne Journal of International Law and an Associate Member of the International Association of Refugee and Migration Law Judges. From 2013-2023 Michelle was a Board member of AMES Australia (Deputy Chair 2020-2023).
In 2022 Michelle was appointed a member of the Global Alliance Taskforce which is responsible for developing the foundational elements of the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, a new initiative which seeks to accelerate solutions to statelessness through a collective multi-stakeholder approach
Deputy Director
Radha Govil
Radha Govil joined the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness as Deputy Director in 2023 after working on issues relating to statelessness and nationality at UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland since 2010. Radha has helped to produce many of UNHCR's key doctrinal and policy positions on statelessness, including in relation to the definition and status of a stateless person under international law, and standards relating to the prevention of childhood statelessness, as well as loss and deprivation of nationality in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. She also developed and led the implementation of the IBelong Campaign, and conceptualised and built the foundational elements for the forthcoming Global Alliance to End Statelessness.
Radha has advised Governments and UNHCR operations and has worked with statelessness experts and partner organisations globally. She has developed a wide range of practical tools to support them in their efforts to prevent and reduce statelessness, and to protect and identify stateless people. Her publications have included book chapters on statelessness and the sustainable development goals (Solving Statelessness, Wolf Press), women, nationality and statelessness (Nationality and Statelessness under International Law, Cambridge University Press), as well as field-based reports for UNHCR on climate change and human mobility, childhood statelessness , stateless minorities, statelessness and the rule of law.
Prior to working at UNHCR, Radha worked as a solicitor in Australia at Mallesons Stephen Jaques (now King Wood Mallesons). She holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, and a Master in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science for which she was awarded the Lauterpacht-Higgens and Georg Schwazenberger prizes.
Associate Director
Katie Robertson
Katie Robertson is the Associate Director at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, focused primarily on the Centre’s domestic engagement. She is also the Director of the Stateless Legal Clinic, which she founded in 2021. She holds a BA/LLB (Hons) and LLM (Public and International Law) from the University of Melbourne.
Katie’s research focuses on the legal rights of stateless children in Australia, with a particular focus on the legal and administrative barriers faced by stateless asylum seeker and refugee children in obtaining Australian citizenship.
As a human rights lawyer with over ten years of experience internationally and in Australia, Katie has first-hand experience acting for stateless asylum seeker and refugee children. She is interested in examining the challenges faced by both these children and the legal practitioners assisting them, with the overall aim of improving the quality and accessibility of legal services available to stateless children in Australia.
Katie is Co-Chair of the Stateless Children Australia Network.
Katie balances her time at the Centre with her role as the Assistant Director of the Melbourne Law School Clinics and teaches in the JD Program.
Katie's full bio and list of publications can be read on LinkedIn Profile and Twitter.
Centre & Programs Manager
Dr Maaike Wienk
Dr Maaike Wienk joined the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness in November 2023. Her previous role was that of Finance, Policy and Advocacy Manager at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) at the University of Melbourne.
Maaike has undertaken a wide range of roles in the higher education sector. Her experience includes finance, fundraising, research support, policy research and reports, governance, coordination of an online collaborative teaching program, and event coordination.
Maaike has a PhD in Labour and Social Security Law from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a Graduate Diploma in Sociology from the University of Melbourne
Advisory Board
Erika Feller
From 2014 to 2017 Erika Feller AO held the appointment of Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne, located in the Melbourne School of Government. She is currently a Professorial Fellow in the School of Government, serving at the same time in various advisory capacities outside the University, including as a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Humanitarian Advisory Group, a social enterprise working to elevate the profile of humanitarian action in Asia and the Pacific.
Erika’s experience with the statelessness portfolio spans many years at very high levels of seniority. UNHCR is the agency in the UN system with the mandate to protect and assist stateless persons. This is predominantly a protection function. Erika oversaw the protection policy and delivery in UNHCR for over 13 years, first in her capacity as Director of the Division of International Protection and then during her 7 years as UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection.
Prior to these respective appointments she had, among others, progressively senior positions within DIP, each of which regularly involved her in activities on behalf of stateless people. These activities have variously included running a series of training courses on the statelessness protection framework for Government officials throughout the Baltic countries; undertaking advocacy missions to countries hosting large groups of stateless persons [for example Vietnam and Thailand, Albania and Montenegro]; visiting stateless populations and discussing possible solutions with host states [notably the Rohingyas in Myanmar]; participating in consultations on the drafting of citizenship laws in an effort to avoid statelessness [for example in Sudan, prior to the breakup of the country into two]; overseeing promotional activities like the drafting of the joint UNHCR/IPU Handbook for Parliamentarians on Statelessness; addressing UN meetings in New York on statelessness; and engagement on numerous stateless cases under UNHCR’s mandate. Most recently she was instrumental in organising the UNHCR/Melbourne University Workshop on Researching Statelessness and Citizenship in Asia and the Pacific held at Melbourne Law School from 27-29 January 2016.
Professor Sarah Biddulph
Professor Sarah Biddulph joined the Asian Law Centre in 1989 and was appointed to a lectureship in the Law School in 1992. She is a graduate of Sydney University in Law and Chinese Studies and studied in Shanghai as one of the Attorney-General's representatives under an exchange agreement with the PRC Ministry of Justice. She worked as a lawyer in Shanghai with the Australian law firm Blake Dawson Waldron between 1998 and 2001 and has near-native fluency in Mandarin. Sarah's research focuses on the Chinese legal system with a particular emphasis on legal policy, law making and enforcement as they affect the administration of justice in China. Her particular areas of research are contemporary Chinese administrative law, criminal procedure, labour, comparative law, and the law regulating social and economic rights. Sarah completed her PhD in 2004, entitled The Legal Field of Policing in China: Administrative Detention and Law Reform.
Dr Maryanne Loughry
Dr Maryanne Loughry is a Sister of Mercy and psychologist and has worked internationally in refugee settings. She commenced her refugee work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in South East Asia in 1988. Her doctoral study investigated the effects of detention on unaccompanied children.
From 1996-to 2004 Dr Loughry was the Pedro Arrupe tutor at the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre from where she conducted research, programme evaluations and humanitarian training in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans, South East Asia and the UK. Presently Dr Loughry is a Research Professor at the School of Social Work, Boston College, Massachusetts and a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), University of Oxford.
Dr Loughry is a member of the Australian Government's Minister of Immigration Advisory Council on Asylum Seekers and Detention (MCASD) and serves on the Governing Committee of the International Catholic Migration Committee (ICMC). She is researching the psychosocial effects of climate-induced displacement in the Pacific. In 2010 Dr Loughry was made a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia for service to refugees.
David Manne
David Manne is a human rights lawyer and Executive Director of Refugee Legal (previously the Refugee & Immigration Legal Centre (RILC)). He has worked in various capacities assisting refugees and asylum seekers for over 20 years. In January 2001, he joined Refugee Legal, at the forefront of defending the rights, the dignity and the lives of asylum seekers, refugees and disadvantaged migrants.
David sat on the Board of the Refugee Council of Australia for seven years, and is currently on the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture Ethics Committee, and a number of peak Government consultative bodies. He has also been appointed to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Advisory Board of Eminent Persons. He has been invited to attend and present at the UN High Commissioner's Dialogue on Protection Challenges on numerous occasions.
David has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Law Institute of Victoria Paul Baker Prize for Administrative and Human Rights Law, the Law Institute President’s Awards (2006 and 2011), was shortlisted for the Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Medal in 2011 and been frequently named as one of Australia’s Leading Immigration Lawyers in the Australian edition of Best Lawyers.
David headed Refugee Legal’s legal teams in successfully arguing 10 out of 10 High Court challenges, including the cases of Plaintiff M61 (regarding the Government’s ‘offshore processing’ regime in Australia); Plaintiffs M70/M106 (the ‘Malaysia Solution’ case); Plaintiff M47 (challenging security assessment and indefinite detention of a refugee); Plaintiff M76 (regarding indefinite detention of a refugee on security grounds); Plaintiff M150 (challenge by a 15 year old unaccompanied refugee in relation to the Government’s attempt to bar permanent protection through a visa cap); and Plaintiff S89 (challenging a Government regulation designed to bar boat arrivals from permanent protection).
Mr Peter McMullin
Peter McMullin has an extensive legal and business career encompassing prominent roles in both the public and private sectors.
Peter is the current Chairman and Director of privately owned, diversified investment company McMullin Group and Special Counsel for Cornwall Stodart Lawyers, specialising in improving outcomes for the firm and its clients by facilitating meaningful connections between like-minded people.
Throughout Peter’s career, he has had a deep-seated interest in community affairs. He has consistently used his professional experience and network to further causes that he feels deeply and passionately about.
Peter’s belief is that the private sector has an important role to play in the resolution of many of our pressing social issues. He has made a significant contribution throughout his career forging positive, constructive partnerships between the private sector and governments, the not-for-profit sector and educational institutions.
Ms Elizabeth Tan
Ms. Elizabeth Tan studied law and languages at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
Ms. Tan joined the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1995 and held numerous positions in Protection, Policy and management. She worked as Associate Protection Officer in Burundi 1995 – 1997 and Sudan 1997– 1998, in the Africa Bureau in Geneva 2000-2006, and in Sri Lanka as Senior Protection Officer 2006 – 2010. Ms Tan was Deputy and then Representative in Egypt 2010 – 2016 and Deputy Representative in Sudan 2016 – 2021.
Since June 2022, she has joined UNHCR’s headquarters in Geneva where she is the Director of the Division of International Protection.
Research Fellows
Philippa Duell-Piening
Philippa Duell-Piening is a Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, working on the Australian Research Council-funded Understanding Statelessness in Australia project. Philippa provides secretariat support to the project’s international advisory group and conducts qualitative research.
Philippa undertook her PhD research at Melbourne Law School and has recently submitted her thesis for examination. Philippa’s PhD research focused on rights realisation for people with disability in refugee contexts.
Before commencing her PhD candidature in 2019, Philippa worked at the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture coordinating the Victorian Refugee Health Network. Philippa has also worked in the forced-migration contexts of Timor-Leste in 2002 and on the Thai-Myanmar border in 2012.
Philippa has a Graduate Diploma in International Law, a Master of Community and International Development and a Bachelor of Occupational Therapy. Philippa has published about refugee and disability rights in a wide range of journals.
Dr Jordana Silverstein
Dr Jordana Silverstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Previously she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, in the Kathleen Fitzpatrick ARC Laureate Research Fellowship Project ‘Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism, 1920s to the Present.’
Jordana is currently conducting an oral history project on statelessness, working in collaboration with the National Library of Australia and creating an archive of interviews with people who were stateless when they came to Australia during the twentieth century. She is also researching the ways that Australian governments have historically approached statelessness, with a particular interest in Australian involvement in – and response to – the drafting of the UN Statelessness Conventions.
She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2015) and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016) and Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (ANU Press, 2021). Her second monograph, Cruel Care: A History of Children At Our Borders, is forthcoming in May 2023 with Monash University Publishing.
Jordana has held a Visiting Fellowship (with grant) at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU (March-May 2019), and was awarded the 2021 Marian Quartly Prize for best article published in History Australia in 2020 for her article entitled "Refugee children, boats and drownings: a history of an Australian 'humanitarian' discourse".
She is a regular expert commentator in the media and has written for outlets such as The Conversation and Overland, as well as having three times been a judge of the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
A cultural historian and the granddaughter of people who were once stateless refugees, Jordana researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies, and Jewish history, focusing on questions of belonging, nationalism, identity, historiography, emotions, sexuality and memory.
Dr Marika Sosnowski
Dr Marika Sosnowski is an admitted lawyer and associate researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. In May 2023, she joined the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness as a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow. Her primary research interests are in the fields of critical security studies, complex political order, local/rebel governance and legal systems, with a particular focus on the Syrian civil war.
Honorary Research Fellows
Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw
Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI)/Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Germany. He is also an honorary fellow at Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. After obtaining his PhD in international and political studies from the University of New South Wales, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and assistant professor (adjunct) at the National University of Singapore in 2016–18 and 2020, respectively. He was affiliated with the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore as a visiting fellow from June 2019 until December 2020. Nyi Nyi has published papers in peer-reviewed journals including Social Identities, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and Review of Faith & International Affairs, and book chapters on citizenship, nationalism and constitutional change in Myanmar, among other topics. He is currently working on a manuscript on Myanmar Spring.
Dr Christoph Sperfeldt
Christoph Sperfeldt is Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and an Associate of the Asia Law Centre at Melbourne Law School. From 2018 to 2021, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, where he led the Centre’s Asia-Pacific engagement and was Academic Convenor of the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative. He is also a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics, Cambodia. Christoph pursues socio-legal research in areas of human rights and justice, including statelessness and legal identity, international and regional human rights protection, and transitional and international criminal justice. He has studied these issues particularly in a context of peacebuilding and development cooperation, with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia. Christoph holds a PhD from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. He was a University Fellow at Charles Darwin University and has held visiting positions at the Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) at the University of Copenhagen, the International Victimology Institute (INTERVICT) at Tilburg University, the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) at KU Leuven, the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Stanford University and Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to joining academia, Christoph worked for more than a decade on human rights, the rule of law and statelessness, predominantly in Southeast Asia. He was Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative, a joint program of the East-West Center and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, where he supported human rights and rule of law capacity development in ASEAN. Prior to this, Christoph was Senior Advisor with the German development agency (GIZ) in Cambodia.
Dr Adil Hasan Khan
Dr Adil Hasan Khan is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where his research seeks to examine different traditions and modalities of legal education and to describe and recover repertoires of training in living well with authority, with others, and their laws. As part of this he is currently completing two main projects. One is a monograph on rival traditions of laws of nations in South Asia, and the displacement of an Indo-Islamic-Persian tradition by a European Colonial international law through transformations in legal education in South Asia over the course of the 19th and mid-20th centuries. Second, is a short monograph that seeks to describe international legal histories written from within the dominant tradition of critique as particular forms of spiritual exercises that seeks to train selves and others into achieving conversion, and thus into forms of life that struggle to live well with others, and their laws. He completed his PhD in International Studies, with a specialisation in International Law and a minor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva (2010-2016). He has been a Senior Research Fellow with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at MLS (2021-2022), a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at MLS (2017-2020), a Residential Institute Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School (2016-2017), and a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna (2015-2016). Currently he is a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University (mid-2023).
Affiliated Researchers
Dr Samantha Balaton-Chrimes
Samantha Balaton-Chrimes is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia).
Her work on statelessness is concerned with communities who are rendered stateless ‘at home’ because of identity-based discrimination, whether in law or bureaucratic practice. She investigates the practical avenues for remedying statelessness and the underlying marginalisation that causes it.
Her broader research program is concerned with enduring political questions about how difference and identity are negotiated in political communities, particularly postcolonial ones. As a political sociologist, she examines mechanisms through which such inequalities are manifest and contested, particularly bureaucracy and classification practices such as censuses and identity registration.
She has particular expertise in statelessness and marginalisation in Africa, and conducts comparative work with other postcolonial settings, including Australia. She is the author of the book ‘Ethnicity, Democracy and Citizenship in Africa: The Political Marginalisation of Kenya’s Nubians’, and numerous articles about citizenship, identity and recognition in Kenya and beyond. Her current book project, funded by an Australian Research Council grant, investigates how bureaucratic practices of ethnic classification shape political life, including access to citizenship, in Kenya.
Professor Susan Kneebone
Over the last decade Susan’s research, teaching and publications have focussed on forced migration, including refugees, statelessness and citizenship, in South East Asia (SEA). In 2006, she was awarded an ARC Linkage Grant: LP0667748; ‘Australia’s Response to Trafficking in Women: Towards a Model for the Regulation of Forced Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region’ (with Julie Debeljak and Bernadette McSherry). A second ARC Linkage Grant followed in 2009: LP0990168; ‘Delivering Effective Protection to Victims and Prevention of Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region’. Additionally, in 2009 she received an ARC Discovery Grant as sole Chief Investigator: DP09844404; ‘Law, Governance and Regulation of Intra-Regional Labour Migration in South East Asia: An Agenda for Protection and Development’.
As a result of research conducted under these projects Susan has extensive experience researching in SEA. The issue of statelessness is a relevant vulnerability factor in human trafficking, especially regarding children of migrant workers and victims of forced marriage (as detailed in two reports arising under LP0990168). The issue of citizenship is important to understanding the rights of migrant workers. Susan’s current ARC Discovery Grant is directly relevant to these issues as it has a focus on the nationality and rights of children of marriage migrants, many of whom are stateless as a result of operation of laws. Through this project, her geographic focus extends to East Asia (Taiwan and South Korea) and her substantive focus statelessness and the rights of children.
Jayani Nadarajalingam
Jayani is a lecturer with the Melbourne School of Government and currently in the final stages of her PhD. She has a BA(Hons)/LLB(Hons) from Monash University and an LLM (Legal Theory) from New York University. Her research methodologies are primarily from political philosophy, constitutional theory and social theory. She is interested in applying these methodologies to law, politics and public policy, with a particular focus on institutional change, social justice and political leadership. Before joining the University of Melbourne in January 2019, she taught a wide range of subjects at Monash University in both the Law and Arts (philosophy) faculties. Last year she was a Kathleen Fitzpatrick visiting fellow with Professor Adrienne Stone's Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at the Melbourne Law School.
Professor John Tobin
Professor John Tobin is the Francine McNiff Chair in International Human Rights Law at Melbourne Law School. He is an internationally recognised expert in human rights with special expertise in children’s rights. In 2010, he was awarded the Barbara Falk Award for Teaching Excellence by the University of Melbourne and in 2011 he was awarded a national citation for outstanding contribution to student learning in the area of human rights. Professor Tobin’s expertise with respect to children’s rights has particular salience for the Centre in light of the fact that UNHCR estimates that there is a stateless child being born at least every 10 minutes, and observes that the effects of being born stateless are profound especially in terms of access to the most basic of human rights such as medical care. Therefore, research and advocacy with regard to the link between children’s rights and statelessness is essential to finding solutions to statelessness. More information...
Graduate Researchers
Hannah Gordon
Hannah Gordon (BA and JD the University of Melbourne) is a PhD Candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Hannah has worked in the statelessness sector since 2019, first in research at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and later as part of regional NGO, Nationality for All. In her time with Nationality for All, Hannah was Lead Researcher on the Statelessness Encyclopedia Asia Pacific (SEAP) and advised on the formation of the Statelessness and Dignified Citizenship Coalition (SDCC) a regional coalition of affected persons, NGOs and individuals working towards addressing statelessness in the Asia Pacific. Hannah is an admitted lawyer, and her research seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice. She is strongly influenced by her experiences working with persons affected by statelessness across the Asia Pacific and her thesis focuses on the current approaches to addressing statelessness in the region.
Email: gordon.h@unimelb.edu.au
Deirdre Brennan
Deirdre Brennan (BSc University College Cork and MA Utrecht University) is a PhD candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Deirdre’s first encounter with statelessness was in 2011, through her interactions with friends affected by the issue in Mae Sai, Thailand. She was struck by the sense of claustrophobia imposed on young people when their right to travel, work or receive an education was restricted by their stateless status. Since then, Deirdre has sought to communicate the impacts of statelessness and the lived experiences of those affected by statelessness. Prior to joining the Centre Deirdre has worked in a variety of research roles in this field, including the Statelessness Programme’s 2014 Thailand Project on the nexus between statelessness and human trafficking, the 2015 Equal Rights Trust publication on gender discrimination in nationality laws, and most recently as a research fellow with the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion where she co-authored a children’s book on childhood statelessness. Deirdre’s doctoral thesis focuses on activism among stateless communities in Nepal and the potential impact of the social movement there to eradicate gender discriminatory nationality laws. Her research interests concern the intersections between feminism, statelessness and activism, stemming from her personal connection to the transformative work of pro-choice activists in Ireland.
Sumedha Choudhury
Sumedha Choudhury is a PhD candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and a member of the Institute of International Law and the Humanities (IILAH). Sumedha’s doctoral thesis focuses on the issue of statelessness in the context of postcolonial states (with a primary focus on India). She has previously worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), India in the Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Unit.
Sumedha holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford and an LLM with a specialisation in International Law from South Asian University.
Andrea Immanuel
Andrea Marilyn Pragashini Immanuel (B.A.B.L. (Honours) School of Excellence in Law, The Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University and LLM Utrecht University) is a PhD candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Her research project is on nationality and statelessness in armed conflict.
Before joining the Centre, Andrea was an Assistant Professor of Legal Practice at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), O.P. Jindal Global University, India. She is a Visiting Fellow of the Centre for International Legal Studies, JGLS and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Public Interest Law, JGLS. In JGLS, she researched widely on nationality and statelessness in South Asia. Andrea has also worked as a Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Assistant and Protection Associate in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), India..
Thomas McGee
Thomas McGee (BA University of Cambridge and MA University of Exeter) is a PhD candidate at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. His research project focuses on Syria’s changing statelessness landscape since the start of the country’s civil war in 2011. Alongside this, he has worked with the centre in Lebanon on a project about “Nomadic Peoples and Statelessness”. Thomas is an Associate member of the European Network on Statelessness and prior to joining the centre worked on their joint Stateless Journeys project with the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. His academic work on statelessness has appeared in the Tilburg Law Review, Statelessness Working Papers Series and the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration. At the same time, he has contributed to a number of Country of Origin Information reports on Syria and served as a country expert for immigration appeal cases relating to stateless Kurds from Syria. Speaking Arabic and Kurdish, Thomas has worked for a decade as an analyst and advisor on humanitarian and development programmes implemented in Syria and with UNHCR in Iraq. He has also engaged on wider human rights and social justice issues, including research on Housing, Land and Property violations in northern Syria, and co-editing a journal special issue on “Genocide and the Kurds”.
Bongkot Napaumporn
Bongkot Napaumporn is a graduate researcher with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Prior to this she worked at the UNHCR's Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok. For the last 15 years, her work has been dedicated to the prevention and reduction of statelessness and the protection of stateless persons who mostly are in protracted situations in South-East Asia. Before joining UNHCR, she was an advocate at the Thammasat University’s legal clinic that worked closely with civil societies and communities of stateless and displaced persons in Thailand. She was involved in key law and policy reforms of Thailand which aimed at improving stateless people’s legal status and access to human rights and promoting their well-being and inclusion in the society. Her areas of expertise include statelessness and nationality, Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, human rights, and forced migration.
Jade Roberts
Jade Roberts is a PhD Candidate and a Teaching Fellow at the Melbourne Law School and co-Managing Editor of the Statelessness and Citizenship Review. Her doctoral research examines alternative approaches to understanding and addressing statelessness in international law. She has previously worked as a Research Associate at Melbourne Law School, and in research roles with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Global Migration Centre in Geneva. Jade is a lawyer and has worked on human rights and refugee cases with Shine Lawyers and The Humanitarian Group. She has a Master’s in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Affiliated Graduate Researchers
Ratu Ayu Asih Kusuma Putri
Ratu Ayu Asih Kusuma Putri is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School researching the intersections between refugee mobilisation, law, and development. Her research is focused on the organisational patterns of refugee communities and her doctoral thesis particularly looks at Rohingya refugee community organisations in Southeast Asia. Ayu holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Indonesia and an M.IR in International Relations from Kyunghee University in South Korea. Prior to joining Melbourne Law School, Ayu worked as a lecturer and junior researcher at a private university in Jakarta from 2015 – 2022. She has conducted research on urban refugee policy and refugee livelihood strategies in Indonesia. Ayu also has been working as a volunteer and advisor for some refugee-led organisations and projects in Indonesia.
Vernon Rive
Vernon Rive (BA/LLB, LLM(Envir)(Hons) (University of Auckland) is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and Associate Professor/Associate Head of School - External Relations at the Auckland University of Technology School of Law. A former partner of New Zealand national law firm Chapman Tripp, Vernon teaches and researches public law, international environmental law, climate change law and natural resource management law.
He is the author of chapters on the 'International Framework', 'New Zealand Climate Change Regulation', 'Emissions Trading' and 'Adaptation to Climate Change in New Zealand' in Climate Change Law and Policy in New Zealand (A. Cameron ed, LexisNexis, 2011); ‘Safe Harbours, Closed Borders? New Zealand Legal and Policy Responses to Climate Displacement in the South Pacific’ in P Martin (ed), A Search for Environmental Justice (Edward Elgar 2015); was lead author of the Laws of New Zealand title on Climate Change (LexisNexis, 2017); and sole author of the Fossil Fuel Subsidies: an International Law Response (Edward Elgar, 2019) .
Vernon is co-convenor of the New Zealand Resource Management Law Association Academic Advisory Group, a member of the managing committee of the New Zealand for Environmental Law, Consultant Editor of the LexisNexis Resource Management Bulletin and Associated Scholar with the EU-based Refract Research Network on Fragmentation and Complexity in Global Governance. His doctoral thesis critically examines existing and future legal and institutional responses to climate change-related displacement, migration and relocation through an international law fragmentation and regime interaction lens.
Nurul Azizah Zayzda
Nurul Azizah Zayzda (BA in Political Sciences Gadjah Mada University, MA in Global Citizenship, Identities and Human Rights, University of Nottingham) is a graduate researcher at Melbourne Law School, PhD Program in Migration, Statelessness and Refugee Studies, Melbourne Social Equity Institute and Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society. Previously working as an academic in International Relations Department and researcher at Research Centre for Gender, Child and Community Services, Jenderal Soedirman University, Indonesia, she has researched is in the area of migration and human rights, particularly on the issues of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers. She had authored and co-authored several publications including “Securitization and Desecuritization of Migration in Indonesia: Its Implication to Refugee Rights in the Southeast Asian Region” (Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights, 2019) and “Left behind children rights as a norm in ASEAN: A Preliminary Study” (An Introduction to Globalization and Citizenship Practices in Indonesia, 2021). Her thesis research is interested in the relationship between international human rights law and mechanism and the refugees’ access to social citizenship in transit countries.
Saika Sabir
Saika Sabir is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the Melbourne Law School. Before joining Melbourne Law School, Saika became an Assistant Professor of Law at O.P. Jindal Global Law School. She has previously worked at the Centre for Comparative Law, National Law University Delhi. Saika was also a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies, National Law School of India University, Bangalore.
Saika has obtained her BA LLB degree from the University of Calcutta and her Master of Law from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. More recently, she got her degree in Master of Research (Law and Society) from the University of Reading, United Kingdom, which she attended on the Felix Scholarship.
Saika has been awarded several other academic scholarships, including the MLS-Max Planck Early Career Exchange Fellowship (2023), the Graduate Research Scholarship (2019) from the University of Melbourne and the prestigious British Chevening Scholarship (2014).