Dr Ella Cockbain: Ella is an Associate Professor in Security and Crime Science at UCL, and a visiting research fellow at Leiden University. She leads the UCL research group on human trafficking, smuggling and exploitation, which has brought in around £2.5 million in competitive grant funding. She also leads a new specialist teaching module on these topics (available to postgraduate and undergraduate students at UCL). She supervises numerous PhD students conducting innovative research into trafficking, smuggling or related topics in contexts including Thailand, Libya, Turkey and the Balkans. Ella’s research to date has mostly focused on human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, labour trafficking and labour market abuses. She has published extensively, including the monograph ‘Offender and Victim Networks in Human Trafficking' (Routledge, 2018), over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and three co-edited books/special issues (with two more forthcoming, including the new book ‘Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions’). She has also done commissioned pieces for various mainstream media outlets, including The Guardian, Middle East Eye, Byline Times, and Open Democracy, plus extensive other engagement with national and international TV, radio and print media.

Ella is committed to encouraging more nuanced, ethical and evidence-informed responses to complex social phenomena. Consequently, she continues to work closely with various organisations across the public sector, civil society and affected populations. She has done invited training, presentations, expert reviews or advisory roles for organisations including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, European Union, EUROPOL, CEPOL, National Crime Agency, National Police Chiefs Council, Home Office, Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse, various government Ministers, HMICFRS, United States Department for Homeland Security, Netherlands Ministry of Justice and Security, and many others. The impact of her work beyond academia was recognised in a REF 2021 impact case study assessed as ‘world leading’. To date, Ella has been the principal (or co-principal) investigator on grants worth over £1.6 million. She previously held a ESRC ‘Future Research Leaders’ fellowship for her work on labour trafficking. She currently co-leads (with Dr Chris Pósch) a major mixed-methods study into the scale and nature of labour market non-compliance experienced by precarious workers, commissioned by the UK’s Director of Labour Market Enforcement). In recognition of her outstanding contributions to social policy research, Ella was awarded Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2023.