Marie McAuliffe (PhD) is an international migration expert with over 30 years of experience in migration research, policy and practice. She is currently the part-time Director of the Migration Shift Hub at the PoliSync Centre for International Policy Engagement in Geneva, Switzerland, while also delivering independent services as a senior consultant to UN agencies, governments and industry. Prior to this, she served for a decade as the head of the Migration Research and Publications Division at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva and was the Editor of IOM’s flagship World Migration Report. Marie is a senior fellow at the Global Migration Centre at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and a Sir Roland Wilson Fellow at the School of Demography at the Australian National University (ANU). She serves as an independent consultant on the Methodological Assurance and Review Panel on Migration Statistics for the UK’s Office of National Statistics. She is a member of MIT’s Global Technology Review Panel, and the IUSSP’s panel on international migration. Between 2016 and 2025 she curated the World Economic Forum’s Migration Transformation Map.

Marie has researched, published and edited widely in academic and policy spheres on migration and displacement, and led five editions of IOM’s biennial World Migration Report, transforming it into the leading global reference report on migration and displacement. Marie serves on the editorial boards of scientific journals International Migration, Migration Studies and Migration and Development, and was an Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review. Marie previously served as an elected board member of the Academic Council on the UN System, a Senior Associate (non-resident) at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, and as co-chair of the World Bank’s KNOMAD thematic working group on migration data and demography. She has been regularly called upon to advise Presidents, Ministers, senior officials and CEOs on migration and displacement, including former UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, in his capacity as Chair of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State.

Marie has led research and policy teams in government and consulted to IOM, ILO as well as in the private sector, including in South Korea, Russia, Central Asia and Türkiye. For three years (2012–2014), Marie directed the $6.5 million Australian irregular migration research program, which resulted in an ANU Press book edited by Marie (with Khalid Koser). Marie was awarded a Sir Roland Wilson scholarship in 2015 to complete doctoral research at ANU on the displacement and migration of Hazara refugees. She is the 2018 recipient of the Charles Price Prize in demography for outstanding doctoral research.