Short bio
As a cultural geographer, an immigrant and ardent fan of the transformative potential of international travel, Meghann Ormond is deeply invested in and concerned with how differently-mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and included in the places they visit and in which they live. Her research focuses mainly on how shifting visions and practices of citizenship and belonging transform transnational mobility, health and care relationships. 

Longer bio
Meghann Ormond is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom.

Meghann is passionate about exploring international travel's capacity to expose people to diverse ways of being in the world and instil in them greater awareness of and sensitivity to humankind's interconnectedness and mutual accountability. Something of a global nomad herself, she's spent nearly all of her adult life outside of the United States and is a dual US and Portuguese citizen. She's studied and worked in Canada, Morocco, Belgium, Portugal, Scotland, Malaysia and the Netherlands.

Meghann draws on this international experience in her research and teaching on diverse facets of cross-border mobility. Her main research interests include 1) transnational medical and long-term care, 2) migrants' integration and heritage-making practices, and 3) travel and recreational opportunities for people with disabilities. This work has led to collaborations with scholars, governmental bodies and non-governmental organisations in Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK and the US. In addition to sitting on the editorial board for the academic journal Current Issues in Tourism, she is a member of the International Migration, Integration & Social Cohesion (IMISCOE) network and the IOM's Migration Health and Development Research Initiative (MHADRI).

In her societal outreach, she collaborates with and contributes to established and emerging initiatives on migrant heritage and accessible tourism in the Netherlands. She is on the board of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague and collaborates with Pocket Stories and Hiraeth Magazine. She also regularly works together with think-tanks, policy-makers and industry representatives to work towards greater health equity in global South countries where international tourism and medical travel are being used as an economic development tool.