Maria Stierna

Maria is a current visiting fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). In her PhD (2023–), she studies food systems in refugee-hosting contexts, drawing on primary data from Northern Uganda (Spring 2025).

Prior to her PhD, Maria was an ODI Fellow in Tanzania (2022-2023) and worked with the Refugee Economies Programme at RSC/ODID (2018-2022), publishing primarily on the socioeconomic lives of refugees and those hosting them in East Africa. Her background also includes UN agencies (FAO and UNICEF), non-profits, and retail, and spans 9 countries on 3 continents.

Maria is pursing her PhD in International Environment and Development studies at The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Her PhD is fully funded by the Norwegian Research Council and is part of the research collaboration ‘Ecofood’. Maria holds a double master’s degree in economics (The Norwegian School of Economics, NHH, 2018) and international management (CEMS, 2018). She has completed further coursework on experimental methods with MIT/J-PAL (2021) and has taught quantitative methods at ODID (2020-2022) and NMBU (2025).