A Computer Engineer turned Human Rights activist advocating for fellow Syrian women

I did not do my research about [Syrian] women merely, it's something I stand in solidarity with. I'm also impacted like them. I couldn't be just neutral, you know, and being too objective and not being connected. Yes, I connect. I belong. It's my cause, it's my people.

Alaa is a Syrian woman activist and development planner, and interdisciplinary practitioner & researcher with a background in computer engineering, with over 14 years of experience working on Syria and across the MENA region and beyond, on Syria particularly, She holds roles as a PhD researcher at UCL's Bartlett Development Planning Unit, Executive Director of Huquqyat, a women-led Syria accountability organisation based in the UK, and as a gender consultant and evaluator on humanitarian and development programmes.

Her career has been shaped profoundly by multiple displacements. Having built expertise in emergency response and education programming when the revolution began in Syria, the onset and ongoing nature of the Syrian armed conflict forced her, like so many of the women she works with, to reconstruct her professional life across borders, institutions, and languages. Rather than narrowing her focus, displacement deepened it: her work gradually shifted from frontline emergency response into advisory and managerial roles at INGOs, managing programmes and partnerships to advance justice, accountability, and recovery for Syria. Her doctoral research at UCL examines housing and inheritance rights for displaced Syrian women, including widows and wives of missing and detained persons — developing original analytical frameworks drawn from her lived experience as both practitioner and researcher, and critically examining the role of humanitarian and development agencies in shaping outcomes for displaced women.

Over the course of her career, Alaa has worked with International organisations including GIZ, Christian Aid, WILPF, Pax for Peace, Expertise France, DRC, and various UN agencies. Has done lots of research supervision and mentoring programmes for early researchers and displaced students, with a focus on women, and brings an insider-outsider positionality that she considers both a methodological asset and a personal responsibility.

In 2025, Alaa received a grant from the OWSD WISDOM programme to conduct a research that she developed examining the trajectories of displaced Syrian women scientists across Turkey, Germany, and Jordan. Her research paper - drawing on survey data, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions - explored how legal, institutional, and social barriers intersect to shape the professional lives of highly qualified displaced women in Academia. Presenting her findings at the OWSD international conference in Rome in April 2026 was a meaningful milestone: a space where her own story as a displaced professional intersected with the stories she was documenting.

For Alaa, the WISDOM programme offered legitimacy, community, and the kind of institutional support that displaced researchers, and helped her contribute to 'local knowledge production' with her own voice and alongside the women she researched, as one of them. She hopes her story reflects her individual resilience and, most importantly, the systemic change that is possible when organisations like OWSD invest in women rebuilding after displacement.