Digital Technologies and Refugee Support: Opportunities and Risks

About the Panelists:

Kelly T. Clements, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees

Kelly T. Clements joined UNHCR as Deputy High Commissioner on 6 July 2015. Clements has been closely involved with refugee and displacement issues throughout her three-decade career. Before joining UNHCR, Clements was a member of the Senior Executive Service, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) where she was responsible for humanitarian issues in Asia and the Middle East and global policy and budget. In 2014, she was Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.

From 1993 to 1996, Clements served at the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on a Foreign Service appointment. She was Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs in 1997-1998. Clements served as a Senior Emergency Officer for Europe, the Newly Independent States, and the Americas, and later as Balkans Assistance Coordinator; she was deployed to Albania in 1999. She worked for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangladesh in 1992.

Jens Hainmueller, Professor of Political Science, Faculty Co-Director of the Immigration Policy Lab

Jens Hainmueller is the Kimberly Glenn Professor in Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) that is focused on the design and evaluation of immigration and integration policies and programs. At IPL, he has led the development and implementation of GeoMatch, a first-of-its kind AI tool that uses administrative data and algorithmic matching to connect refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants to host communities where they are most likely to succeed. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development.

Professor Hainmueller has published close to 70 articles that have been cited more than 37,000 times, many of them on immigration in top general science journals and top field journals in political science, statistics, economics, and business.His research has received funding from organizations such as Schmidt Futures, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research has won various awards including the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, the Warren Miller Prize, the Robert H. Durr award, and the Emerging Scholar award by the Society of Political Methodology. He was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and inducted as a Fellow of the Society of Political Methodology. He has received an honorary degree from the European University Institute (EUI).

Adam Lichtenheld, Executive Director at the Immigration Policy Lab

Adam Lichtenheld is the Executive Director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, where he leads IPL’s global research and innovation agenda. He has worked with governments, donor agencies, and NGOs around the world to design and evaluate policies and programs on migration and displacement, violence prevention, conflict resolution, stabilization, and governance. He is the author of Guilt by Location: Forced Displacement and Population Sorting in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and his research, analysis, and commentary has appeared in a number of academic and policy journals, along with the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Just Security, and The Conversation. He has also taught university courses on forced migration and conflict, and trained development practitioners on research methods and program evaluation. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation. Previously, he was Senior Researcher for Peace and Conflict at Mercy Corps and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University.

Christian Mogensen, TechPlomacy Team Leader at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark

Christian Mogensen is the team lead and senior advisor to the Danish Tech Ambassador in Silicon Valley. Christian has spent his full career working to ensure that policymakers, parents and professionals understand the dynamics of the internet, even as it rapidly changes from one trend to another. His academic work focused on the social dynamics of online communities and forum-culture, which in turn laid the foundation for understanding more secluded corners of the digital sphere.

On a daily basis, Christian works to ensure that the technological advances pivotal to the self-identity of Silicon Valley, will serve a greater humanitarian good, and as many citizens all over the world as possible. Christian’s work has been featured in television, radio, podcasts and conferences across Europe and the US.

Dominik Rothenhäusler, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Stanford University 

Dominik Rothenhäusler, is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. His research centers around causal inference, heterogeneous data, high-dimensional statistics and graphical models. He is a co-Principal Investigator on the GeoMatch project with IPL and is particularly interested in inference in settings where traditional statistical measures of uncertainty are insufficient. For example, due to changing circumstances or confounding the distribution of the data might change between data sets. Developing better methods to deal with distribution shifts could increase replicability of feature selections and reliability of prediction mechanisms. He was the 2022 recipient of the David Cox Research Prize by the Royal Statistical Society. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich.

About the Moderator:

Martine Gram Barbry, Deputy Tech Ambassador and Deputy Consul General at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark

Martine Gram Barbry is the Deputy Tech Ambassador at the Danish Tech Ambassador’s Office in Silicon Valley. Previously, she served as Head of the Trade Department at the Consulate General in New York, where she and her team worked strategically to support and enhance the competitiveness of Danish companies in North America, particularly in relation to the UN, promoting Danish services, products, and solutions.

Gram Barbry has extensive management experience within the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having held roles such as Consul General in Hamburg and Executive Director for Innovation Centre Denmark in Hong Kong. She possesses in-depth knowledge of global public affairs, international trade, and trade diplomacy.

Before joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gram Barbry worked as Head of Administration for the Danish Social Democrats in the European Parliament and also held various positions in the private sector.