Selma Porobić holds a Ph.D. degree in migration studies from Lund University in Sweden, combined with postgraduate studies at the American University in Cairo and a professional diploma in International Humanitarian Assistance from Fordham University in New York.

She is currently a program manager of the Aurora European Universities Alliance at the Rector’s office of Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and a work package leader for the Capacity Development Program in Central-Eastern Europe, coordinating Ukraine support on behalf of 9 Aurora universities.

She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London and a governing board member of the Research Network ‘Transnational Memory and Identity‘ for the Council for European Studies, Colombia University, New York.

Dr. Porobić has published on a variety of issues focusing on war displacement and post-war recovery with cross-cutting themes of human rights, gender, mental health, and education.

Recently, her research is focused on social trauma in post-conflict societies and peace education. Her latest book, co-edited with Brad Blitz, is entitled Forced Migration, Gender, and Wellbeing. The Long-term Effects of Displacement on Women (Edward Elgar Publishing, UK).

In 2006 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, at Oxford University. From 2011-2016 she was an executive director of UNHCR’s only research center for refugee and IDP studies in the Western Balkans (CESI). Between 2014-2017 she led the SDC’s RRPP (Fribourg University) 3-year-funded, cross-country project that employed 28 researchers looking into the long-term effects of war-displacement and protracted socio-political transitions in Serbia, Kosovo, and BiH. In 2012 she founded International Summer Schools in Refugee Law and Rights with late, OBE Professor Emerita Barbara Harrell-Bond.

She has taught refugee law, humanitarian studies, psychology, and social anthropology at various universities in Scandinavia, the UK, Western Balkans, and Central Europe.