About Us

Erica L Nelson, MD, PhM, MAS is an Emergency Medicine physician who conducts research on the use of geospatial methods for public health and humanitarian response. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin with an PhM in International Peace Studies and Development, she worked as a researcher and policy consultant for organizations serving conflict-affected populations in Nepal, Indonesia, the Balkans, Palestine, Ethiopia, and Sudan. She completed her medical training at the University of Washington, residency at the Harvard-Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program, and an MAS in Spatial Analysis for Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she is a physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Department, an instructor within the Division of Global Emergency Services and Humanitarian Programs in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the co-founder of the Harvard Humanitarian Geospatial Analysis Program and the co-director of the Signal Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and the deputy medical director of Team Rubicon. 

Gillian Elliott is a GIS analyst, environmentalist, and human rights advocate. After completing her bachelor’s degree with a double major in anthropology and environmental sciences from the University of Virginia, she went on to gain two years of hands-on experience with ArcGIS in her role as a technical support analyst at Esri. Most recently, she received her master’s degree in Austria from the Vienna Master in Applied Human Rights, an interdisciplinary MA program hosted at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna). Here, she wrote her master’s thesis on sea-level rise and potential (forced) migration while connecting it to the international human rights legal framework. Her methods included a spatial analysis in a local setting to identify which homes, and by extension how many people, will likely be directly impacted by projected sea-level rise by 2050 and 2100. Gillian is interested in applications of geospatial methods to human rights issues, including humanitarian crises. Currently she works as the research project coordinator for the Signal Program at HHI, a program which aims to make it easier for frontline organizations to leverage geospatial tools in their work towards anticipating and preventing atrocities.

Madhawa “Mads” Palihapitiya is a conflict early warning expert with over twenty years of experience in atrocities prevention in several global hotspots. He is a practitioner of “third generation” citizen-based conflict early warning with notable academic work in the areas of conflict early warning, technology for non-violence, and religion and the arts for peace building. Over the years, Mads has developed several geospatial early warning tools that emphasize the need to bridge the warning-to-response gap. Mads is also an expert in Mediation/Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) methods, particularly ADR research and dispute systems design. He is an expert in evaluation, particularly needs assessment, asset mapping and participatory methods. Currently, Mads is the associate director and research director of the statutory state dispute resolution, Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration, a senior fellow at the Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development; an adjunct professor at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston, and a co-convener of the Trust Network.

Godfred (Kofi) Nyarko is the research program manager for the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He also serves as a monitoring and evaluation consultant for the Signal Program. Kofi has a diverse professional background. He served as the country director for Mercy Project Ghana where he fought daily to eradicate slavery from his homeland. Kofi helped liberate over 50 children and reunified them with their families. In past years, Kofi worked in health information management both in the United States and Ghana, including working as a biostatistics assistant at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, Ghana, and as a project assistant at the Medical University of South Carolina. Kofi holds a BA in Population and Health from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and an MA in International Development Policy with a certificate in Negotiations and Leadership from The University of Chicago. Kofi is interested in organizational effectiveness, particularly within the humanitarian sector.

Sophie Hayes is a current MS GIS student in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She is a graduate trainee at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Program, where she is interested in decolonization and capacity-building within geospatial analytics. She is also a graduate research assistant and GIS lead on an interdisciplinary project entitled “Erasing Refugees: How Camps Became Killing Fields in the Congo,” supported by the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University and American University. The project investigates Rwandan refugee memory creation and is supported by a geospatial archive of refugee journeys and mass violence events. She received her BA in Geography and Environmental Science also from Clark University, where her undergraduate honors thesis explored hydrological risks to unceded Indigenous territory along Lake Superior by an Enbridge petroleum pipeline.