“Prospects for the Middle East in 2023”

Laura has been Senior Middle East Analyst at Oxford Analytica since September 2016. She covers the wider Levant, Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Iraq, and Iran. Before this, she was an affiliated lecturer teaching Middle East politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a special supervisor at Newnham College.

As an independent consultant, she specialised in the interface between political and economic issues in the Middle East and Africa. Before that, she spent five years in Khartoum, working as an economic adviser for the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the European Union. She was also an adviser to the mediation team on the South Sudanese secession negotiations.

Her talk will look at what 2023 might hold for the Middle East region, given the current global context, Islamic fundamentalism, and the aftermath of the February earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

Professor Monica Lakhanpaul, clinician (consultant paediatrician), science communicator, and Professor of Integrated Community Child Health at the University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, will talk about her research work, focused on using collaborative, participatory, and creative methods to work directly with communities, particularly the most vulnerable in society, and the professionals that support them, in order to ensure their voices are heard in planning and implementing ways to improve their health and wellbeing.

Her projects often involve working with female participants – girls, mothers, teachers, carers, and others – who have historically had fewer opportunities to raise their voices and actively participant in these critical discussions. To ensure everyone has a voice in the decisions about them, she works closely with photographers, sound artists, street artists, and others to ensure science does not just ‘sit on a shelf’, but is communicated to policy makers and practitioners, and action can be taken.

She will also share insights from her experience leading multiple crossinstitutional, cross-sector, and national and global projects, such as in India, to optimise child and adolescent health and wellbeing in areas such as early years development, nutrition, sanitation, mental health, health inequalities, minority health issues, and COVID-19 pandemic recovery.