Impact Prize winner Mona Jebril has been awarded a British Academy Global Innovation Fellowship to work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Interdisciplinary social scientist Mona Jebril has been awarded a British Academy Global Innovation Fellowship which will see her spending a year working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank’s office in Washington DC.
The objective of the Global Innovation Fellowship programme is to build a mutually beneficial partnership between UK-based early- and mid-career researchers from across the humanities and social sciences and Carnegie to enable fresh perspectives, expanded networks and strengthened links across policy and academia and to support knowledge mobilisation and the development of new approaches to policy challenges.
The one-year fellowship, which is overseen by the British Academy and funded by the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, will see two awardees receive £150,000 each.
The five areas funded by the fellowships are:
- Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics.
- Global Order and Institutions.
- South and East Asia.
- Middle East and North Africa.
- Security and Defence.
Applicants had “to demonstrate a solid understanding of the relevant issues, including the applicable policy landscape and the systemic challenges that it faces”.
Mona [2012], who did her PhD in Education and whose work focuses on Gaza and conflict-affected zones in the Middle East, will be working within the think tank’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, but will continue to be based at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research where she will be a Senior Research Fellow.
She says: “I’m delighted to receive this award, which perfectly aligns with my interests, bridging academia and policy through critical research aimed at improving lives in the Middle East and beyond. I am very thankful to the British Academy and Carnegie Endowment for making this global innovation opportunity possible.
“I am also grateful to the Centre for Business Research, for their invaluable support with my application, especially Professor Simon Deakin and Stephanie Saunders, and to Queens’ College for providing a supportive environment. I also appreciated the helpful guidance provided by university careers advisors Vicki Tipton and Diane Caldwell.
“2025 began with the Gates 25th Anniversary Impact Prize and ends with this exciting award. I am looking forward to starting the fellowship in September and the exciting research ahead!”
Mona was one of eight winners of the Gates Cambridge Impact Prize, announced last January. As a researcher who has written on everything from higher education in Gaza to health policy, she has experimented with all sorts of different genres, from animation to poetry and the award recognised her ability to communicate her research and to highlight the issues faced by academics from conflict zones. Mona also hosts a podcast, A Life Lived in Conflict, which gives a voice to people in conflict areas and from different disciplines.
The first Gates Cambridge Scholar from Gaza, she spoke at the award ceremony about her trajectory from school teacher to lecturer to researcher and how, after her master’s, she struggled to make sense of the theories she had learned in the UK in the context of what was going on in Gaza on the ground. She said that was what had spurred her to look for different ways to communicate her research findings.
*Picture credit: Raphael Nael.
