Michaela is an international development practitioner specialising in faith-based participation in peacebuilding; the operations lead for the Social Consequences of Religion: Religion & Peacebuilding research team as well as the Research & Operations Director for Seek Peace, a small peacebuilding NGO supporting faith-based organisations and communities to plan, learn, adapt and fund faith motivated, evidence-led everyday peacebuilding.

Michaela is a ESRC funded PhD candidate at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. Her ethnographic research explores the extent to which moral identity and religion play a role in transgressive, interreligious friendships and local prosocial dynamics in conflict contexts where religious identities are salient.

Australian-born, dual British national, Michaela spent five years working in post-conflict peacebuilding in Nigeria before returning and settling in the UK in 2020 during the pandemic and establishing Seek Peace.