Dr Alexandre Bish is the Head of Research Innovation in the North Africa and Sahel Observatory. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at UCL and the co-founder of MyRA, an ethical AI platform for qualitative data analysis.

Alex has over a decade of experience researching migration, conflict, and crime dynamics in West, Central, and North Africa. He holds a PhD in Security and Crime Science from UCL, where his research focused on irregular migration, smuggling and trafficking along the Central Mediterranean Route to Europe, using novel computational methods to uncover how people travelling become trapped in cycles of detention, forced labour, and exploitation. Alex has held visiting academic positions at Yale University and the University of Oxford and guest lectures at King’s College London, UCL and City University Hong Kong.

Alex has conducted extensive fieldwork across Africa, working with vulnerable populations and hard-to-reach groups, including smugglers, traffickers, rebels, and militants. Before joining GITOC in 2017, he worked for the EU and UN in Nigeria.

Through projects with MyRA, Alex combines his expertise in qualitative research with innovative AI-enabled approaches to both accelerate and enhance social science research.