Dr Sabah Boufkhed is currently a Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at The University of Manchester. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London’s Cicely Saunders Institute for Palliative Care and Rehabilitation.

Sabah is an interdisciplinary global health researcher committed to social justice. Her research topics include preparedness and response to public health emergencies, labour exploitation and (migrant) workers’ health, and global palliative care.  In particular, Sabah supports a human-centred and social determinant of health approach to improve preparedness and response to crises.

She is currently a co-investigator on the T-AP project “Who Cares? Rebuilding Care in a Post-Pandemic World”, which is a 6-country consortium unded by the UKRI-ESRC for the UK part. Sabah and her colleague at UCL-IRDR's Centre for Gender and Disasters leads on an innovative mixed-methods study on the labour conditions, exploitation and health of low-paid care workers, during and after the pandemic. The research is being conducted in Brazil, Colombia, France, UK and USA.

Sabah is actively engaged outside of Academia. She co-founded organisations aiming at empowering and supporting women and ‘minorities’ in science and academia, is a Trustee for an NGO in Global Health and Development and a migration expert for an international development think-tank. 

Main research interests include:

• Labour exploitation and underrepresented population’s health (incl. precarious work & modern slavery)
• Preparedness & response to crisis (incl. conflict and public health emergencies)
• Palliative care in conflict-affected settings
• (transversal theme) Improving research methods to work with underrepresented populations

Expertise in mixed-methods and interdisciplinary research; quantitative and qualitative participatory methods (low- to high-income countries) and implementation science.