Meet the Board of Directors

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Dr. Tricia Redeker Hepner is a political and legal anthropologist with expertise in migration and displacement, transnationalism, human rights, transitional justice, militarism, and conflict and peace.

She has conducted research in the Horn of Africa and with refugees and asylum seekers from Eritrea/Ethiopia in North America, Europe, and Africa for over twenty years. This long-term work has informed her participation in hundreds of asylum and refugee cases, and her testimony has been influential in immigration rulings in the US, Canada, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the US Fulbright Scholars Program in Germany. 

From 2006-2020 she held positions in the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where she co-founded and directed the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights (DDHR) Program. She joined the faculty of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University in 2020, where she currently directs the graduate program in Social Justice and Human Rights, serves on the Executive Committee of the ASU Global Human Rights Hub, and co-chairs the Hub Migration Working Group with Dr. Malay Firoz.

Geoffrey Hervey, MEd is a graduate student, community organizer, and mental health professional hailing from Memphis, TN. 

After completing their undergraduate and graduate studies throughout the state of Tennessee, Geoffrey began their mental health professional career and helped co-found community mental health organizations that serve the Middle TN area; Geoffrey currently resides in Washington DC as a Psy.D candidate in Clinical Psychology.

Christina Pao (any pronouns) is a PhD student at Princeton University in Sociology and Social Policy, and she holds an MPhil in Sociology and Demography from the University of Oxford and a BA/MA in Political Science from Yale University. 

Christina’s work focuses on social demography and questions of the critical “quantification” of complex social identities, such as gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status. Her prior work primarily looked at refugee integration processes in Germany and Japan through the lens of civic engagement, and she continues to organize academic events that critically engage with the idea of “measuring” migration. Christina attempts to bridge policy and action with research, and she continues to work alongside nonprofits to use knowledge from survey experiments to inform messaging and organizational practice. 

Christina’s studies have been funded by a Rhodes Scholarship (2020) and a Truman Scholarship (2019).

Hera Jay Brown, MPhil is the Founder and Executive Director of Sanctuarium. Her academic and professional works center on the intersections of human rights and justice with domestic and international legal regimes governing asylum, development, displacement, and labor in Jordan, the EU, and the US. Prior to this role, Hera Jay completed her Master's training at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford, Hera Jay conducted research on the implementation and reception of the Jordan Compact's labor permit program within the Hashemite Kingdom.

Prior to Oxford, Hera Jay held several positions in research, the non-profit sector, and the policy world including time with Munich's joyn-coop as a Junior Consultant on labor policies, the Refugee Youth Program, the American University in Cairo's Presidential Associates Program, and the Biden Foundation in Washington DC. She has received multiple awards and recognitions for her work including the Fulbright-Schuman Graduate Research Fellowship, the Rhodes Scholarship, the Rhodes Service Year Award, the University of Tennessee's Chancellor's Medallion, and the Gilman International Scholarship to Jordan. She has also written about and presented her work with numerous universities, non-profits, and academic conferences in the US and Europe. 

A desire to advance the rights of and protections for marginalized communities around the globe remains the core driver throughout all of her work. 

Bobbie Benavidez is a doctoral candidate in the biological sciences subfield of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research broadly focuses on population genetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework. She is interested in understanding how political-economic systems and environmental stressors impact biological processes that are inherited by the next generation and widening the disparities gap. 

Currently, she collaborates with Yucatec Maya community members in Mexico where there is an increased burden of non-communicable diseases. Her work focuses on centering Indigenous knowledge and health-based systems to account for social determinants of health in ways that are culturally relevant. Her methodological approach employs a bio-cultural perspective to help clarify the complex relationships between health, culture and environment in an effort to identify genetic susceptibility to disease and Indigenous cultural practices that mitigate these risks with a long-term goal of informing future policy interventions that best serve the community.

She received her Bachelors in Anthropology with a concentration in biological sciences from California State University, Dominguez Hills. As the Board Member of Education for Shared Science, a non-profit that serves underrepresented communities throughout Southern California, she was able to focus on her passion working with youth and promoting diversity and inclusion in STEM-related fields.

Elizabeth Campbell is a recent graduate of Boston College Law School, where she currently holds a legal fellowship in the school’s Center for Experiential Learning. In this role, she works alongside students and faculty to provide direct legal services in the greater Boston area, primarily in the civil litigation and administrative contexts. Much of Elizabeth’s professional focus centers family justice and advocacy, which she sees as being inextricably connected to larger goals of dignity and access for all.

 In addition to her Juris Doctor, Elizabeth holds a BA in History and Politics and International Affairs from Furman University.

Malay Firoz is a political anthropologist with expertise in humanitarianism, human rights, forced migration and Middle East politics. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and an MA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

His research focuses on the politics of humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, analyzing the ethical implications of “resilience-based” aid programs for humanitarian principles and refugee rights. His work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Science Foundationand the American Philosophical Society.

Malay joined Arizona State University as an assistant professor of anthropology in 2020, where he currently teaches in the Social Justice and Human Rights program, serves on the Executive Committee of the ASU Global Human Rights Hub, and co-chairs the Hub Migration Working Group with Dr. Tricia Redeker Hepner.

Jenn Ostrowski is a public health researcher focused on humanitarian response and migration. She currently works as the Director of Research at the Taimaka Project, a Nigerian-US non-profit organization focused on addressing acute malnutrition among children through direct implementation and operational research. 

Prior to joining Taimaka, Jenn worked with the Program on Forced Migration and Health to research health systems responses to forced migration and the public health implications of migration policies within the Covid-19 response. She has worked with a variety of other research organizations and service providers, including the Women’s Refugee Commission, Annunciation House, MSF, and the Global Health Justice and Governance Program. Jenn completed her Master’s training in public health and humanitarian policy at Columbia University. 

A commitment to bridge research and practice, advance justice and equity, and center the perspectives and experiences of people affected by humanitarian crises and forced migration are central to much of her work.