Luisa joined the University of Bath in September 2016 as a Lecturer in International Development. Before joining Bath, Luisa worked as a Research Fellow for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicin based in Northern Sierra Leone, where she conducted social science research looking into community experiences of the West African Ebola outbreak and acceptability of biomedical interventions such as vaccine trials. Prior to that Luisa completed her DPhil from Oxford University's Department of International Development. Her doctorate explored the relationship between youth unemployment and political violence through qualitative research amongst urban youth in Sierra Leone.

Luisa's research takes an anthropological approach to exploring the political dimensions of development and humanitarian emergencies. Her interests lie in understanding how people experience, engage with and occasionally resist development interventions in their daily lives. Her current ESRC-funded research project studies how the securitisation of poverty and development impacts on what it means to be a citizen in times of crisis, through the experiences of young Sierra Leoneans living in informal settlements during the Ebola epidemic. By looking at how young people experienced the militarised containment of disease in their neighbourhoods, the project will probe into the nature of state-society and negotiations and contestations of citizenship.