Václav Moravec
Lead Coordinator, CEDMO
Václav is the main coordinator and chairs the strategic board of the CEDMO consortium. He is a researcher at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University and at the Department of Production at FAMU in Prague. He specializes in the transformation of audiovisual media, journalistic ethics, automated journalism and artificial intelligence journalism. He is the principal investigator of several European and Czech research grants (e.g. DIGITAL-2023-DEPLOY-04, project 101158609). He is a member of the executive committee of the prg.ai initiative for artificial intelligence.
Lenka Kabrhelová
Host of the Seznam Zprávy Podcasts 5:59 and MDŽ
Journalist, presenter, founder and host of the Seznam Zprávy podcasts 5:59 and MDŽ. She worked as a presenter, reporter and foreign correspondent for Czech Radio in Russia (2008–2013) and the USA (2013–2017), her reporting led her to almost 20 countries. She is a founder of the award-winning Czech Radio podcast Vinohradská 12. She is the recipient of the 2020 Karel Havlíček Borovský Prize. In 2017, she received the prestigious Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard University, where she focused on media polarization and Central Europe’s relations with Russia and the United States.
Paula Gori
Paula is the Secretary-General and Coordinator of EDMO, based in the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) at the European University Institute. She originally joined the STG in 2017, and she is currently a member of the management team. Previously, she was the Coordinator of the Florence School of Regulation – Communications and Media and she collaborated with the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom, which she coordinated during the initial set-up phase back in 2012. For several years, she was the Scientific Coordinator of the Annual Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics. Her current research interests include digital policy, information integrity, AI, and climate disinformation. She recently co-edited a book by Springer on “Disinformation: a Multi-disciplinary analysis”, to which she also contributed to with a chapter on climate change disinformation.
Silvio Waisbord
Professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University
Silvio is Professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is Past President and Fellow of the International Communication Association. He is the Editor of the International Journal of Communication. He is the author and editor of twenty books, as well as articles on journalism and politics, communication studies, media policy, and communication for social change. His most recent book is Introduction to Journalism: Thinking Globally (Polity). He served as Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University (2020-2023). Also, he is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics. Waisbord received a Licenciatura in Sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego.
Tommaso Canetta
Chair of the EDMO Taskforce for Elections and Crisis-Related Disinformation, Deputy Director of the Italian fact-checking organizations Pagella Politica and Facta.news, Member of the EDMO Executive Board
Tommaso is the Deputy Director of the Italian fact-checking organizations Pagella Politica and Facta.news, and works on the main European and international projects involving the two media outlets. In particular, he is a member of the EDMO Executive Board and coordinator of EDMO fact-checking activities, chair of the EDMO Taskforce on Elections and Crisis-Related Disinformation, a member of the Governance Body of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), coordinator of IDMO fact-checking activities, and a member of the Code of Practice on Disinformation Taskforce. He holds a master’s degree in Law, specializing in International and European Law, as well as a master’s degree in Journalism.
Michal Pěchouček
Rector of the Czech Technical University
Michal is the rector of the Czech Technical University in Prague for the 2026–2030 term. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. He is distinctly recognized for his contributions in the field of AI agents and multi-agent systems. He has 5,936 citations to his name. In 2001, Michal founded the Center for Artificial Intelligence at CTU, where he continues to serve as a professor. He is a general partner and head of the AI practice at Evolution Equity Partners. He served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Gen (NASDAQ: GEN) and Avast (LSE: AVST). He has also led research and development in AI and cybersecurity at CISCO (NASDAQ: CISCO). He has co-founded several startups, including Cognitive Security (acquired by CISCO) and Blindspot.AI (acquired by the ADASTRA Group).
František Štěch
Coordinator of the Research Group for Theology and Contemporary Culture at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University
František is the coordinator of the Research Group for Theology and Contemporary Culture at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University. His work focuses primarily on fundamental and systematic theology, with a current emphasis on the theological interpretation of landscape, cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies. He also teaches hermeneutics at the Ecumenical Institute of the Protestant Theological Faculty. He has authored numerous scholarly publications and occasionally works as a private consultant alongside his academic activities.
Veronika Jursová Prachárová
Director of the Slovak Governance Institute (SGI) and a Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Comenius University Bratislava.
Veronika is Director of the Slovak Governance Institute (SGI) and a Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Comenius University Bratislava. Her research focuses on public administration, transparency, rule of law, access to information, energy policies, and disinformation and media literacy. She is also involved in the fact-checking initiative Demagog.sk.
Karina Stasiuk-Krajewska
Associate Professor at USWPS University
Karina is an associate professor at USWPS University in the field of social communication and media studies. The coordinator of research activities in Central European Digital Media Observatory and ADAC.io consortium. Expert of IFCN and the EDMO’s Group of Experts on Structural Indicators for the Code of Practice on Disinformation. Scientifically she deals with issues of ethics and professionalization of journalism, public relations and fact-checking, research on disinformation as well as quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis. Author of over one hundred scientific publications, Media Lan manager at USWPS University. Author and co-author of several educational programs in the field of journalism, media, and social communication at the university level.
Ludmila Hamplová
Public-health Communication Specialist
Ludmila is a public-health communication specialist and science editor focused on risk communication, community engagement, and infodemic management in Central and Eastern Europe. She leads science-journalism initiatives with the SCIENCE+ project at Free Press Eastern Europe and previously reported for Zdravotnický deník. She has served in roles at the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic. She is currently developing a comparative study on institutional communication around vaccine hesitancy in the Czech Republic and Israel.
Jakub Hankovský
Country Manager of Ipsos in Slovakia and a Member of the Board of Ipsos Central Europe
Jakub is the Country Manager of Ipsos in Slovakia and a member of the Board of Ipsos Central Europe. He specializes in market and public opinion research, with a strong focus on innovative methodologies, big data analytics, social media research, and the application of generative AI in social sciences. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Comenius University Bratislava and previously studied public and social policy at Charles University. Alongside his research and leadership activities, he is also engaged in academic teaching and the development of innovative approaches to online and social media data analysis.
Márton Kárpáti
President and Founder of Van Másik Ltd. and Telex.hu
Márton is the president and founder of Van Másik Ltd. and Telex.hu in Budapest. Telex, being Hungary’s largest, community-funded news source. It grew out of the idea that readers should be able to learn about what’s going on in Hungary and the world at large from a well-rounded, interesting, entertaining, and impartial news source that is not dependent on any economic or political interests. Kárpáti has an extensive experience in hungarian media. He was political editor at TV2 and at Index.hu Zrt. and a political correspondent at MTI Zrt.
Roman Imielski
First Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza
Roman is the First Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza. Former managing editor, head of the foreign and political desks at Gazeta Wyborcza, and editor-in-chief of Wyborcza.pl. Author of numerous articles on Polish politics, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and transatlantic relations. A commentator on international and Polish affairs in electronic media. He has worked at Gazeta Wyborcza since 1995, initially in the local newsroom in Katowice, and since 2001 at the Warsaw headquarters as deputy head of the sports desk. A trained historian and a graduate of the University of Silesia, he is a co-author of the book The Kremlin’s Most Important Match about the football World Cup in Russia. He teaches journalism at SWPS University. He is a member of the international media organizations INMA and WAN-IFRA.
Jan Paťawa
Founder of KRIT – The Institute for Crisis Communication
Jan is the founder of KRIT – the Institute for Crisis Communication, an independent organisation based in Prague. For four years he led the Strategic Communication Department at the Czech Ministry of the Interior – the central body responsible for the state’s strategic and acute crisis communication – until it was dissolved in April 2026. Under his leadership the department coordinated state communication during the 2023 Charles University shooting, waves of bomb threats against schools, the 2024 floods and a nationwide power outage, and created the national “72 Hours” preparedness handbook, distributed to 5.2 million households. He previously spent fourteen years as a creative director in the private sector. He approaches institutional communication not as PR but as a public service – and as critical infrastructure in a world of polycrises.
Filip Harzer
Foreign Affairs Reporter at Seznam Zprávy
Filip is a foreign affairs reporter at Seznam Zprávy. He specializes in Central Europe, with a particular focus on Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, where he covers politics, elections, democracy, media and security. His reporting regularly takes him across the region, covering elections, societal change and major political developments. He has also reported from Ukraine during Russia’s full scale invasion and from the United States. He is the author of the podcast series Směr Fico, exploring contemporary Slovakia under Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Jakub Šimko
Researcher at KInIT
Jakub is a researcher in the areas of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, human computation, crowdsourcing and human-AI symbiosis. He focuses on the research topic of data augmentation. He is a researcher at KInIT, where he also leads the Web and User Data Processing team. He co-authored more than 40 internationally recognized publications, together receiving more than 900 citations. Currently, he is participating in 4 European research projects. In 2021, he was co-awarded the Best Paper Award at the prestigious ACM RecSys conference for KInIT’s social media auditing research.
Jan Čech
Computer Vision Researcher
Jan holds a PhD degree in Artificial Inteligence. As a computer vision researcher, his main interests lie in face-related interpretation problems, encompassing both analysis and synthesis. His publications have amassed more than 2000 citations. Previously, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at INRIA, France.
Danae Tsabouraki
Project Manager at ATC Innovation Lab
Danae holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and a Master’s degree in Sociology of Law from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, as well as a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She has been practicing law since 2012, mainly in the fields of civil and corporate law (intellectual property, data protection, contracts, competition law, etc.). Danae has been working at the ATC Innovation Lab since 2018 as a Project Manager in EU R&D-funded projects, focusing on the media sector and disinformation. She is currently involved among others in the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) as an operations consultant, as well as other H2020 and Horizon Europe projects with a focus on media and disinformation.
Wiktoria Kałus
Content Coordinator and Analyst at the Demagog Association
Wiktoria is a Content Coordinator and Analyst at the Demagog Association. In her daily work, Wiktoria verifies and debunks false information across a wide range of topics. She is also a mentor at the Fact-Checking Academy, where she leads workshops and training sessions on recognizing disinformation for diverse social groups. She contributes to the preparation of English-language reports that focus on disinformation and security-related issues.
Jan Fridrichovský
Editor-In-Chief at Demagog.cz
Jan manages fact-checking at Demagog.cz, where he oversees operations within Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking program and the fact-checking work of CEDMO. He has extensive experience in fact-checking and editorial management and leads a team of analysts and editors. His background spans market analysis and legal work, and he holds degrees in Economic Policy and International Relations as well as in Law and Legal Science.
Marie Šafář Postma
Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at Tilburg University
Marie is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at Tilburg University. She is the founder of the Academic Collaborative Center for Resilient Democratic Society (REDES), and her research combines computational methods from AI and data science with insights from cognitive science to study how narratives, disinformation, and synthetic media shape human belief and trust. Recent work includes AI-driven detection of polarizing narratives and the actors behind them. She supervises doctoral research on the early detection of disinformation on social media within several projects including the ELSA Lab Defence. In 2026 she was invited to speak on cognitive resilience at a NATO workshop on cognitive warfare, and her current research increasingly extends the computational study of cognitive security into military and defence contexts. Originally from Prague, she holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam.
Ivan R. Cuker
Data Analyst at CEDMO
Ivan is a data analyst at CEDMO. He participates in the longitudinal research CEDMO Trends and international research conducted in several European countries. He has hands-on experience with both quantitative and qualitative research methods. He has been involved in several grant projects in academia and has also worked in applied research in the private sector. In addition to data processing, he also focuses on the presentation of analytical outputs. Ivan is a sociologist and social anthropologist by educational background. He is currently completing his PhD studies. In academia, his main interests are environmental education and the study of neoliberalism.
Katarína Klingová
Senior Research Fellow at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute
Katarína is a Senior Research Fellow at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute, a think tank based in Bratislava. As member of GLOBSEC’s Democracy & Resilience Program she has been analysing disinformation and influence operations Central Europe region since 2016.
She has authored or co-authored numerous analyses on the impact of information operations and social media on a democratic society, building societal resilience against hybrid threats and strategic communication. In her previous capacities, she worked for Transparency International Slovakia and the European Commission.
Marie Bohner
Marie is the Head of Development and Partnerships, Digital Investigation at Agence France-Presse (AFP) and works on development and policy strategies to support AFP’s global digital investigation team, which takes in more than 130 journalists and 26 languages globally. She accompanies partnerships with the Digital Investigation’s department partners – including major social media platforms, EU institutions, as well as with peer digital investigation and fact-checking organisations in Europe and globally. She is also a member of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network’s (EFCSN) Governance Body, as well as of its policy task force. Marie coordinated the award-winning CrossCheck France collaborative project, gathering more than 30 newsrooms and tech partners to tackle disinformation during the French Presidential Election in 2017. She did so on behalf of First Draft and was their Global Head of Partnerships until 2021. She’s currently based in France.
Peter Kováč
Co-founder, Doctors Speak Up
Peter studied both medicine and law at Comenius University in Bratislava. He is a board-certified forensic physician, forensic expert and university lecturer, and works at the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine of Comenius University and at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology of Trnava University. He is a founding member of Lekári nahlas.
In his work, he has long operated at the intersection of medicine, law and technology, and also focuses on issues related to the reliability of medical information in practice. He is a co-author of professional standards issued by the Ministry of Health of the Slovak Republic and has contributed to the preparation of legislative changes in the fields of healthcare and criminal law.
For seventeen years, he served as Chief Legal Officer at ESET, where he focused on the legal aspects of technology and the digital environment. Today, he serves as Of Counsel at the law firm Kinstellar, where he focuses on healthcare, life sciences, technology and compliance. Since 2025, he has also been a member of the Presidium of the Slovak Bar Association.
Magdalena Wilczyńska
Director of the Cyberspace Information Protection Division at NASK
Magdalena is Director of the Cyberspace Information Protection Division at NASK – National Research Institute, where she leads teams responsible for disinformation analysis, cybersecurity awareness, and educational activities. Her work focuses on information integrity, democracy, and human rights, with particular expertise in disinformation research and countermeasures. At the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, she led a team analysing and systematising methods of Russian propaganda in Poland. She also managed multinational disinformation research projects conducted across 14 European countries by the TechSoup Foundation. Wilczyńska has contributed to international initiatives investigating Russian information manipulation and electoral disinformation, including projects at Debunk EU and Alliance4Europe, where she worked with the DISARM Framework methodology. She also initiated and coordinated Measure the Information, an educational programme aimed at strengthening young people’s resilience to disinformation. Previously, she served as a legal expert in the Department of Constitutional, International and European Law at the Polish Ombudsman’s Office, working on issues related to freedom of expression, assembly, the rule of law, and judicial independence. As a researcher at the Jagiellonian University, she participated in the POPREBEL project on political and social change in Central and Eastern Europe. She holds degrees in Human Rights, Law, and Journalism from Central European University and the University of Warsaw. She is a recipient of the Landecker Democracy Fellowship and is active in the Humanity in Action network.
Natalia Gruenpeter
Expert at the Disinformation Analysis Centre (OAD) at NASK in Poland
Natalia is an expert in fact-checking, narrative analysis, and science communication at the Disinformation Analysis Centre (NASK, Poland). She focuses on health-and science-related misinformation, monitoring emerging narratives in digital media and supporting initiatives that strengthen information resilience and public trust in science. Natalia has extensive experience in training, public engagement, Open Science, and research data management, and collaborates with universities, public institutions, and health-sector stakeholders to promote evidence-based communication.