Ali Criado-Perez is registered nurse, with a background in Accident and Emergency nursing. With three grown-up children, she started working for MSF in 2007, achieving a long-held ambition to work in humanitarian aid.
She has recently returned from working with MSF's search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, providing healthcare to people caught in the migration and refugee crisis.
Ali's work with MSF has taken her to some of the most remote areas of the world. From the South American rainforest to mud-brick villages of northern Nigeria, from the front line of the conflict in Libya to a refugee camp in South Sudan, offering medical aid to the thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing across the border into eastern Turkey to the West African Ebola Crisis in 2014.
During her first mission in northern Uganda she supervised a clinic providing health care to people displaced by the long-standing conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army. In the jungle of Colombia, accessible only by canoe, Ali helped provide health care to remote communities who had been subjected to years of violence and displacement by guerrilla groups. From South America back to sub-Saharan Africa: in 2010, an emergency call convened a small team to treat lead poisoning on an unprecedented scale, amongst rural communities in northern Nigeria. Later that year, floods devastated a nearby area and Ali returned to help assess the situation and provide medical care. In 2011 came Ali’s greatest challenge: joining an MSF team to evacuate war-wounded from Misrata in Libya, at the height of the conflict. She spent three months living in a tent on a flood plain in South Sudan, providing health care to the 35,000 refugees in Jamam Camp, who had fled bombing north of the border.
In early 2014 Ali worked in Central African Republic assisting people affected by the brutal conflict.
In early 2014 Ali worked in Central African Republic assisting people affected by the brutal conflict and later in the year in Sierra Leone on the West Africa Ebola Outbreak.
