profile

Alex Odlum is a researcher interested in how humanitarian workers and organisations make decisions, communicate and coordinate when producing and consuming data in crises. His research focuses on how values, norms and heuristics affect quantification and knowledge generation processes, as well as their ethical implications. To investigate these topics, Alex deploys both quantitative and qualitative methods, from laboratory experiments, to surveys, interviews and computational text analysis. He has been a researcher at the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies since March 2020 and a PhD student at the University of Lausanne, Department of Organizational Behaviour since September 2020. Previously, Alex worked in needs assessment and analysis, information and knowledge management, and monitoring and evaluation, with humanitarian organisations including ACAPS, the International Organization for Migration, and the Mixed Migration Centre. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and Bachelor degrees in Law and International Studies from the University of Adelaide.