Biography
Supervisor: Carlos Vargas-Silva and Ridhi Kashyap
College affiliation: Jesus College
Kristen is a Grand Union DTP Scholar with an Advanced Quantitative Methods award. Broadly, her research interests include experimental and quasi-experimental program evaluation methods in humanitarian contexts, and her DPhil explores the role of social networks in supporting the well-being of individuals experiencing displacement. For the 2024/2025 academic year, she is a teaching assistant for two core courses of the MSc in Migration Studies: Migration and the Economy and Quantitative Methods.
Most recently, she worked with the World Food Programme from 2019 to 2024 to coordinate a set of experimental impact evaluations to improve programming in conflict- and crisis-affected settings. She still partners with WFP to support their research activities.
Previously, Kristen has conducted research with the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Oxfam, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). She holds an MSc in Impact Evaluation for International Development from the University of East Anglia and a BA in Sociology with Mathematics from Southwestern University in Texas.
Select publications:
Will Syrian Refugees Go ‘Home’? A Look at Some Experimental Evidence On Return Intentions
Measuring social cohesion in contexts of displacement: do researchers agree?
COMPAS Gogglebox: What we’ve been watching in lockdown
The COMPAS 2020 Migration Book Review: what we read when we stayed at home
Food and Forced Migration: a COMPAS Q&A on the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize
Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yTKRUwYAAAAJ&hl=en