Members

Gruia Badescu, born in Bucharest, Romania, is currently a research fellow at the University of Konstanz, though this academic year he is a fellow in Paris. He has a background in urban design and social sciences and holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, with his research focusing on post-war reconstruction. His work explores cities and memory, as well as the recovery of cities following conflicts and authoritarian regimes.

Natalya Bekhta did her MA in Lviv, Ukraine, her PhD in Giessen, Germany and her postdoc in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, she is heading two research projects at Tampere University in Finland dealing with Utopia, literary theory, philosophy and Eastern Europe after 1989.

Jonas Bornemann works as Assistant Professor of European law at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is a legal scientist by training, specialising in the field of European constitutional law and migration law. He currently works on the rule of law crisis in Europe, the Schengen area and the reform of EU migration and asylum laws.

Lia Dostlieva (b. Donetsk, Ukraine) is an artist, cultural anthropologist, and essayist. Her art and research practice engage with issues of collective trauma, decolonial narratives, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups.

She was a participant of the National Pavilion of Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale. She has exhibited her works at various international venues, including the Malta Biennale, Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Kolumba Museum (Cologne, Germany), Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (Tbilisi, Georgia), National Museum of Fine Arts (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), and the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), among others.

Florian Gasser is an interdisciplinary researcher, consultant, and politician based in Italy and Switzerland. He holds six university degrees, including a PhD in Management from the University of St. Gallen. His work focuses on digital transformation, electoral participation, and consumer and sustainability-related behaviour. He has contributed as a researcher and consultant at the University of St. Gallen, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and the Free University of Bolzano, and has lived and worked across the US, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria. He also completed an executive diplomatic degree with honours. From 2023 to 2025, he served as Vice-President of the Youth of the European People’s Party. He is active in think tanks (Zukunft-Fabrik.2050), speaks at international conferences (e.g. COP28, St. Gallen Symposium), and has received multiple academic awards, including the DGT-ITB Research Award and the Alfred Gerardi Memorial Award.

Anna Grebinyk is a biochemist, born and educated in Kyiv, Ukraine. She transferred her research to Germany in 2015, where she got a summa cum laude PhD in biology in 2021 from Würzburg University. Since 2022, Anna leads the biolab at the DESY Zeuthen, where she links accelerator physics with biomedicine, using electrons to fight cancer. As a hobby painter, she knows that beauty can always be found, that is why Anna sees cancer as a technological battle to win and believes in the democratic prosperous future even at the darkest times of war in Europe.

Rodoljub Jovanović is a Research Fellow and a Coordinator of EduLab at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD in Human Rights from the University of Deusto and works at the intersection of social psychology, education, and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. His research focuses on youth, collective memory, and the role of education and civil society in reconciliation processes, particularly in the Western Balkans. His work involves close cooperation with educators, youth initiatives, and civil society actors across borders, exploring how grassroots engagement, memory work, and digital practices can contribute to dialogue, non-violence, and sustainable peace.

Stanisław Krawczyk was born in Konin in Central Poland and currently lives in Warsaw. After studying psychology as well as Polish philology, he did a PhD in the sociology of literature. Currently, his research focuses on national aspects of video games and on the multilingualism of the social sciences and humanities.

Maria Kucheriava was born in the South of Ukraine and currently lives in Kyiv. After studying economics, did a PhD in accounting devoted to issues of data quality assessment. Currently, her research focuses on stimulating the development of a circular economy in Ukraine (rooting the European practice) and international taxation issues. Maria currently works at the “Academy of Financial Management” in Kyiv.

Kateryna Latysh was born in Kharkiv (Ukraine) and currently resides in Vilnius (Lithuania). With a PhD in law, she works as MSCA4Ukraine Fellow on a Digital Forensic, OSINT and Artificial Intelligence project at Vilnius University. Since 2014, she has been teaching at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Kharkiv, Ukraine). Kateryna was involved in several public sector projects, serving as an assistant to a Member of the Canadian (2013) and Ukrainian (2018–2019) Parliament, later as Project manager at the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the President of the Republic of Lithuania. She has also practiced as Ukrainian Barrister.

Stefan Matern is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Political Theory at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism, and propaganda, with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration with social psychology on questions of democratic stability, victimhood narratives, and memory politics.

Jana Mende was born in Warburg and currently lives in Halle, Germany. She studied Comparative Literature in Vienna, and did a PhD in Comparative Literature and German Linguistics. Her research focusses on digital literary history in Europe as well as multilingualism and migration in literary studies.

Roman Nekoliak is a Senior International Relations Officer at the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties (Kyiv, Ukraine). He holds an LLM from Ghent University (Belgium) and a PhD in Law. He also serves as an adviser for several NGOs. His expertise covers human rights, European law, media law, international humanitarian law (IHL), criminal law, and international law. In recent years, Roman has been actively advocating for the ratification of the Rome Statute, fighting impunity, promoting the international criminal justice system and IHL compliance, and working on legal mechanisms for future court proceedings on Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine.

Alina Nychyk specializes in EU-Ukraine-Russia relations and Ukraine’s foreign policy. She is a Senior Researcher at Zurich University of Applied Sciences and a Guest Lecturer at TU Dresden. Alina worked at ETH Zurich and RECET, Vienna University. She earned a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester (2022), after completing a Master’s at Wroclaw University of Economics and a Bachelor’s at Kyiv National Economic University.

Nazar Pavlyuk was born in Lviv, Ukraine. He studied Inorganic Chemistry at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv from 2013 to 2023, writing his PhD thesis on Magnesium-based alloys for practical applications. Currently his research focusses on technical implementation of specific metal alloys in hydrogen economy, namely as electrochemical Metal-Hydride Batteries and solid state Metal-Hydride Hydrogen Storage.

Michael Martin Richter is a German-Polish researcher and policy expert specializing in Central and Eastern European politics, with a focus on Ukraine’s political economy and anti-corruption reforms. His professional experience includes roles as a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, a Fellow at Harvard University and co-founder of the Warsaw-based Coopernicus think tank.

Denys Shatalov was born in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, and currently lives there. After studying history, hedid a PhD in history. His current research focuses on the entanglement and interaction of imagination, commemoration and memory of World War II and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Oleksandra Shumilova was born in Mykolayiv, Ukraine, where she has also completed a master’s degree in ecology and environmental protection. She holds a doctoral degree in River Science jointly awarded by Free University of Berlin in Germany and University of Trento in Italy. Presently, Oleksandra lives in Berlin and works as a postdoc at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. Her research covers ecology of intermittent rivers, ecohydraulic and geomorphic controls of biodiversity within river floodplains, and sustainability of water resources during and after armed conflicts.

Katalin Solymosi was born and also currently lives in Budapest, Hungary. She is a biologist, who obtained her PhD in experimental plant biology. In her research related to sustainable agriculture, she aims to understand how plastid structure and function is affected by climate change and environmental pollution. She was founding member and Co-chair of the Hungarian Young Academy and was Chair of the Young Academy of Europe.

Imdad Ullah was born in Pakistan and currently lives in Hamburg, Germany. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Erfurt. His research focuses on war and drone warfare. More specifically, he examines the ongoing war in Ukraine and the broader insecurity it generates across Eastern European states. 

Sebastian Willert was born in Hannover. He studied History and lives in Berlin, where he obtained his PhD in Art History. His current research and teaching focus on the forced academic migration of scholars in the 1930s and 1940s and the provenance and translocation histories of archaeological objects to Berlin and Istanbul in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Anna Wójcik is a Polish legal scholar specializing in the rule of law and human rights law. She is the Principal Investigator of a project examining EU media regulation and the protection of the rule of law in Member States, funded by the National Science Centre–Poland. Anna is based in the Constitutional Law Division at Kozminski University in Warsaw, Poland (2024-2027). In 2023/24, she was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. She earned her doctorate in law from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2021. Anna frequently comments on legal developments in Poland for think tanks and media outlets.

Andrei Zavadski, born in Ashmyany, Belarus, is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and editor based in Berlin. He is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Art and Material Culture, TU Dortmund University, and a co-founder of The February Journal. He works at the intersections of memory studies, museum studies, and media studies, with a focus on Eastern Europe, and has written on the 2020 protests in Belarus, Gulag memory, the remembrance of the 1990s in Russia, Germany’s memoryscape, museum participation, and dialogic remembering.