Benedetta Lana is a social scientist specialized in Human Rights and Migration, with a focus on the European framework. In the last years she has increasingly focused her research on the right to health and the right to housing, and on their accessibility for people on the move in transit and destination countries. Medical expulsions have been at the centre of her recent works and publications, dealing with vulnerability understood in legal, sociological and biomedical terms.
Research Engineer at Pasteur since September 2020, she is part of the Ecology and Anthropology of Emerging Diseases Unit and she works on a research project focusing on vulnerability assessment and community engagement face to COVID-19. The study – to be carried out in rural and urban French areas – aims to highlight locally-meaningful categories of vulnerability in order to inform the institutional and informal sectors’ response face to the current epidemics’ biomedical, social and human consequences.
Benedetta holds a MA in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action with minors in Migrations and African Studies, obtained from Sciences Po Paris in July 2020. She has previously graduated from a 4-year BA in European Studies and French at King’s College London in 2018. During her studies, she developed a specific interest in the topic of displacement in urban settings and access to services in informal settlements. Thus, she has worked as an intern for the City of Turin in Project MOI – a multi-stakeholder urban resettlement project for migrants. Benedetta has also been volunteering for several years with associations providing legal support to asylum-seekers in urban camps, both in Turin and Paris. At the end of her studies, she undertook a traineeship at the Odysseus Academic Network where she engaged in research consultations on the upcoming reforms of the EU asylum and migration legal framework.
