Meet Our Team

Leigh Ong (she/her) is an undergraduate Law and Global Studies student at the University of Auckland, majoring in Global Politics and Human Rights and sub-majoring in Chinese. She is interested in how the law can further equity, particularly the rights of displaced people, and is excited to implement what she has learned to further the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies’ (CAPRS’) mission and mahi.

Manal El Mazbouh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts and Education. She has worked in the educational field for many years, holding various teaching and administrative roles in both her home country of Lebanon and several Gulf nations. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), where she explored the usability and impact of educational technology (interactive whiteboards) on teaching and learning.

Her research interests still lie in educational technology, with a current focus on the whys and hows of the implementation of educational management information systems (EMIS) in development contexts, using a critical realist lens to examine the implications of the rise of a data-driven culture that seeks to “quantify” education.

She is the Programme Coordinator for the CAPRS Non-Residential Fellowship (NRF) Programme, supporting MA and PhD holders to convert their research into impact-oriented policy outputs that inform policy, advance advocacy, and support change. She enjoys traveling to new places and trying new activities such as parasailing or scuba diving. More often though, she can be found spending time with family and friends or curling up with a good book in her spare time.

Email Address: manal.elmazbouh@auckland.ac.nz

Michelle Oledan Ferns (she/her) is the Aotearoa New Zealand-based Programme Manager at the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS). She returned to Aotearoa in 2020 and now calls Ōtautahi | Christchurch home. At CAPRS, Michelle contributes to strategy, communications, and coordination, with a focus on building partnerships, supporting refugee leadership, and advancing regional advocacy. Her role includes working closely with the New Zealand Refugee Advisory Panel, leading media and communications, and overseeing team operations.

Michelle has worked on refugee and asylum protection issues for over a decade across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Thailand.

While based in Melbourne, she worked with the Refugee Council of Australia as Project Manager for the International Policy and Community Engagement Team, where she led engagement in Asia Pacific and global policy processes. She also coordinated the Refugee Alternatives Conference, a national platform that centres refugee leadership. In parallel, she served as the Australian Coordinator for the Global Campaign to End Child Detention, leading a cross-sector collaboration of 26 organisations nationwide.

A third culture kid, Michelle was born in the Philippines and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand with her two brothers by her Filipino mother and Liverpudlian father. Her work is grounded in collaboration, equity, and a deep commitment to advancing effective, meaningful refugee participation in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Rêz Gardi MNZM is a co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS). She is an international human rights lawyer and a trailblazer in the global refugee leadership movement. Born in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her Kurdish family fled genocide, Rêz turned her challenging start in life into a lifelong mission of advocating for others. She became New Zealand’s first Kurdish female lawyer and the first Kurd to graduate from Harvard Law School, where she earned a Master of Laws as a Fulbright Scholar.

She is also the Co-Managing Director of Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table (R-SEAT), the only global refugee-led organisation focused on advancing refugee leadership in international decision-making. Through this work, she has helped lead refugee participation in high-level policy forums, including the United Nations General Assembly, the Global Refugee Forum, and the Human Rights Council. She is also the founder of Empower, a refugee-youth-led organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand working to address educational inequity and increase representation of refugee youth in tertiary education.

Her previous roles span litigation, research, policy, and advocacy. She has worked as a litigator at one of New Zealand’s leading law firms, served at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, and taught international law and human rights. As a Harvard Human Rights Fellow in Iraq, building cases for the prosecution of ISIS for their genocidal campaign against the Yezidis, including mass executions, kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, and other human rights abuses.

Rez has represented refugee perspectives at the highest levels of global policy. She represented New Zealand in the inaugural Global Refugee Youth Consultations in Geneva and was a founding member of the Global Youth Advisory Council to UNHCR. In 2020, she helped establish the Refugee Advisory Group for the UNHCR Consultations on Resettlement and Complementary Pathways. She serves on UNHCR’s Advisory Board and as an expert for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative.

In recognition of her service, Rez was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2025 for services to human rights and refugees. She was named Young New Zealander of the Year in 2017 and recognised as one of New Zealand’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in 2021.

Dr. Ritesh Shah has been an affiliated scholar of CAPRS since its inception and became co-director of CAPRS in February 2025.   Ritesh’s scholarship and teaching explores the political economy of education provision in times of conflict and crisis.  His work critically interrogates how the competing and varied interests of international actors/agencies, national governments, civil society, and affected communities’ shapes why, how and for whom quality, relevant education is afforded to and not in such settings.  Between 2021-2023, he led a large-scale research project titled ACCESS.  The project, which was carried out in Colombia, Uganda, Pakistan, Nigeria and Jordan explored what precludes non-formal education programming for out of school children and youth being available, accessible, adaptable, and acceptable to the learners themselves and their communities, and how this might be changed. 

Increasingly, Ritesh’s work has sought to challenge the global humanitarian architecture and the logics behind it, which he argues remain grounded saviourism, racial capitalism, and (neo)imperialism.   Specific attention within this critique is directed at the education in emergencies (EiE) community, and he continues to work with stakeholders across the sector to imagine how  their collective work can be reimagined. 

Over the years, Ritesh has worked closely with a range of UN agencies, bilateral donors, and INGOs in a range of contexts across Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.  He has also contributed to global guidance and policies on education sector resilience and recovery,  accelerated education programming, and higher education in times of conflict/crisis.   He is viewed as a leading scholar and thought leader within the EiE community.  

Within his role in CAPRS, Ritesh hopes to strengthen meaningful refugee participation as a practice and way of working, not only in Aotearoa, but in education responses internationally.  He also acknowledges that as someone without lived experience, he too needs to shift the ways that his own expertise and knowledge are valorised over those of others. 

You can find out more about Ritesh’s research and publications here.  

Ma Mya Aye (she/her) is a qualified educator with interests and experience in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), educational innovation, education in crisis and educational equity. She worked as an educational manager, educational consultant, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educator and teacher trainer in subrural Myanmar as well as volunteered in community rural educational developmental projects. She holds an MA in TESOL awarded by Victoria University of Wellington. She currently works for the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS) as a Communications Coordinator. 

Gül İnanç is a historian of modern diplomacy, whose research and teaching interests shifted over the 30 + years of her career. She has been researching, publishing, teaching on the topics of cultural heritage, forced displacement, history education for peace and religious art & architecture.  She is the founder of Opening Universities for Refugees, a global initiative, which advocates for the human rights- based education for all. She has received the Koh Boon Kwee Scholars Award in August 2016 for inspirational teaching her course Faith in Art at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she was affiliated between 2012-2022 as a fulltime faculty. She had co-founded the Center for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2020. She has worked as an expert advisor and curriculum developer for UNESCO’s Understanding Shared Histories: A Teaching Package, which has been translated into 7 languages. She is currently running cultural heritage projects with her students in Dadaab Camp, Kenya, is offering executive training for universities in the USA and in Mexico and running a production company, Black Turtle-neck, which she recently co-founded.She is based in Singapore. 

Professor Jay Marlowe is a co-founder and former Co-Director (2020–2024) of the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS), and currently serves as Head of the School of Social Practice at the University of Auckland. Jay’s research focuses on refugee studies and settlement futures as it relates to migration policy, transnationalism, role of communication technologies and disaster risk reduction. He has secured multiple prestigious research grants and is a former Rutherford Discovery Fellow, publishing over 100 academic works, including his book Belonging and Transnational Refugee Settlement: Unsettling the Everyday and the Extraordinary with Routledge.