Stephen Cornish

Speaker at the St. Gallen Symposium

Stephen Cornish has served as General Director of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) Operational Center in Geneva since 2020. During more than ten years of field experience, Mr Cornish managed several major MSF humanitarian interventions in contexts such as Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Georgia, and Peru. He has successfully negotiated humanitarian access to vulnerable populations in conflict settings across the globe and has played a lead role resolving aid-worker abduction crises and other emergencies. From 2008 to 2012, Mr Cornish sat on the board of directors of MSF Canada, before serving as their Executive Director from 2012 to 2017. He also worked with the Canadian Red Cross as manager of programs for countries in armed conflict, for CARE Canada as a policy and advocacy advisor, and for other international organisations with a focus on humanitarian and environmental issues. Mr Cornish holds a Master’s degree in global risk and crisis management from the Université Panthéon Sorbonne in Paris and a post-graduate diploma in conflict resolution from the University of Bradford.