Patrick R. Ireland, Ph.D.

A West Michigan native, Dr. Ireland studied modern languages, comparative politics, and international relations at the University of Notre Dame and Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1990. Funded by the European Commission, the French government's Bourse Chateaubriand, the German Marshall Fund, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Krupp Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, he has written extensively on Muslims and other migrants in Europe and North America. His work has been based on extensive field work conducted in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and North Africa.

Dr. Ireland has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Education; as a manuscript reviewer for a number of academic journals and university presses; as a Senior Research Associate with the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego; and as an advisory board member of the Centre for European Political Communications at the University of Leeds in England, the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs in Lebanon, and the EU-funded Multicultural Democracy and Immigrants' Social Capital in Europe (MULTIDEM) Project.

Professor Ireland has taught at several institutions in the U.S., as well as for shorter stints in Germany, Ghana, and Morocco. Before coming to IIT, he was on the faculty at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. His teaching repertoire includes courses on comparative politics and public policy, European and African politics, global migration, international political economy, and research methods. In 2003-2005, he underwent training in migrant and border health and earned a Master's in Public Health from the University of Texas. In his free time, he volunteers with refugee resettlement, migrant rights, and AIDS education projects both locally and abroad.

Dr. Ireland is completing projects on ethnic segregation in European cities, African female domestic workers in the Middle East, quality of life and social capital in a South Texas barrio, and migration and HIV-AIDS.  His future research will focus on the relationships between migration, health, and development in Morocco/Europe and the U.S./Mexico.