World Refugee & Migration Council Vice President of Research Elizabeth Ferris has received the prestigious Center for Migration Studies award for excellence in migration scholarship. The Center for Migration Studies gave the award to Ferris, who is Research Professor and Director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Migration (ISIM), at its annual gala on November 18 in New York. She also delivered the keynote address at the CMS Academic and Policy Symposium.
Ferris has led research for the WRMC since its inception, originally the World Refugee Council, and was instrumental in the development of the Council’s major 2019 report launched at the United Nations in New York. The report, Un llamado a la acción: Transformar el sistema global de refugio, outlines 55 recommendations offering bold, actionable ideas to galvanize political will and transform the global system for refugees and internally displaced persons.
Ferris served as Senior Advisor to the UN General Assembly’s Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York and from 2019-21 as an expert advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a Senior Fellow and co-director of the Brookings Project on Internal Displacement and spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance, most recently in Geneva, Switzerland at the World Council of Churches. She has written extensively on a range of humanitarian issues from Syria to Central America to climate migration to solutions for internally displaced persons. Bringing a combination of on-the-ground experience with academic expertise, she has written over 1000 policy briefs, academic articles and reports and has written or edited ten books. She is well-known in the international humanitarian community and currently serves on more than ten NGO boards of directors, editorial boards, and various UN advisory groups. At Georgetown, she has taught many courses on refugees, migration and humanitarian issues and spearheaded the development of the University’s new Masters Program in International Migration and Refugees.
