Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. [1] She undertook her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding Professor in Women’s Studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women’s Studies, a position she held until 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women’s Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed until 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2001-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994-5. She was founding director of the Centre for the Humanities from 2007 until September 2016. Braidotti’s publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection of social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies. The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory.

[1] Image credit Sally Tsoutas

Nina Braun works at the German Aerospace Centre Project Management Agency (DLR-PT), where she coordinates the international network of National Contact Points for Societal Challenge 6 (SC6) — ‘Europe in a changing world: inclusive, innovative and reflective societies’ in Horizon 2020, Net4Society. She has been a Governing Board member of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) since 2018, a group that focuses on the advocacy and science policy organisation for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe. Nina studied at the University of Science and Technologies in Lille, France, where she obtained master’s degrees in Global E-Business, International Management and Economies.

Antonia Caro González is Head of the International Research Project Office (IRPO) at the University of Deusto in Bilbao and has extensive experience in managing complex interdisciplinary research collaborations and community engagement with multi-stakeholder counterparts (academic, government, private sector and civil society). With over 20 years of experience in research internationalisation, she is the senior counsellor for the Rector’s team in strategic research planning. She is currently responsible for the three Deusto Master Plans on ‘Internationalisation’, ‘Social Impact’ and ‘Interdisciplinary Platforms’) and in charge of boosting the 6 I’s Research Model and its implementation at the University of Deusto. She is an evaluator for the European Commission (H2020, COSME) and a manager and researcher on international research projects (FP7-GEITONIES; FP7-SPBUILD; FP7-INTEGRIM; FP7-SI-DRIVE, H2020-SOLIDUS, H2020-DIRS COFUND, H2020-GEARING Roles, H2020-6i DIRS). In addition, Dr Caro is member of various Boards of Directors, including: European Social Innovation School (ESSI); the ‘Covenant on Demographic Change’ and of the Ethics, Disciplinary and Private Relations Committee of the GaragErasmus Foundation. She is also part of the team that led the Basque Country to become a four-star Reference Site within the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ (EIP) on Active and Healthy Ageing. She led the publication of the position paper (Universities, Policy Makers and Stakeholders fostering Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) nested systems for Societal Impact) which emerged from a workshop focused on the societal impact of research.

Fionn is Programme Lead for the Human Insights Lab at The Dock, Accenture’s flagship R&D and Global Innovation centre. The lab brings the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities into innovation projects exploring emerging challenges at the intersection of business, technology and society.

Prior to joining The Dock in 2017, Fionn spent five years with Science Gallery, first engaging audiences with the exhibition programmes in the Dublin gallery, and later mobilising its innovative approach to public engagement with science and the arts worldwide through the development of a network of several other university-linked galleries worldwide. Previously, Fionn has worked as a creative producer and consultant on a diverse range of cultural and digital media projects, was a campaign manager for a breakthrough campaign in the 2011 Irish General Election, and was the director of digital at a marketing agency at the dawn of digital marketing in 2007.

Fionn is also the founder of the biennial island festival Turkfest, sits on the board of the immersive theatre & fine art company Anu Productions, and has served on the boards of both GAZE Film Festival and Darklight Film Festival.

Geoffrey Crossick is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was Director of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s major ‘Cultural Value Project’ which published its report in 2016, and recently completed a report for the Global Cultural Districts Network on the social impact of cultural districts. His previous roles include Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, Warden of Goldsmiths, Chief Executive of the former Arts & Humanities Research Board, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Development) and Professor of History at the University of Essex. He speaks in the UK and internationally on the importance of the arts and humanities, the value of arts and culture, and the creative economy. Amongst his other positions is Chair of the Crafts Council in England and membership of the Boards of the Horniman Museum, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the National Film & Television School. He is a social historian of 19th- and 20th-century Britain and continental Europe, including the social history of the petite bourgeoisie.

Kurt Deketelaere has been Secretary-General of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) since July 2009. He is also a full Professor of Environmental, Energy, Climate and Construction Law at the University of Leuven, the university where he studied Law (1984-1989), obtained his PhD in Law (1989-1995) and spent his whole academic career. For his leadership in EU research, innovation and education policy, he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Edinburgh on 6 July 2017, and the (first) Scaliger Medal by Leiden University on 19 September 2017. He received, for LERU, the University Medal of the University of Geneva on 11 October 2019. Before joining LERU, Kurt was the chief legal advisor (2004-2007) and the chief of staff (2007-2009) of the Flemish Minister for Public Works, Energy, Environment and Nature. He was awarded the title of honorary chief of staff of the Flemish Government. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of IE University (Madrid) and Humanitas University (Milano), the High Level Advisory Board of the Insight Foresight Institute (IFI) in Madrid, and the International Leadership Advisory Board of the Center for Learning Innovations and Customized Knowledge Solutions (Dubai). By invitation of the European Commission, he is a member of the Open Science Policy Platform and the ABS Consultation Forum. He is chairman of Sustainability College Bruges.

Alice Dijkstra is Senior Programme Officer at the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO), responsible for the coordination of the Dutch National Roadmap for Large Research Infrastructures and for advising on international Social Sciences and Humanities policy and implementation. She studied Computational Linguistics at Utrecht University. After working as at IBM Amsterdam, she carried out research at Nijmegen University and Leiden University. Since 1994 she has been employed by NWO where she has been responsible for setting up and coordinating several big multi-stakeholder research programmes including the Dutch Cognitive Science Programme, and the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) programme. She also coordinated the Dutch-Flemish HLT research and infrastructure programmes Corpus of Spoken Dutch and STEVIN.

She has international experience in running the ERANET project HERA and in coordinating the four subsequent HERA Joint Research Programmes. In addition, she is involved in the JPI Cultural Heritage and in the Trans-Atlantic Platform. At NWO she advises on the international activities in the SSH domain and actively participates in the NWO Strategic International Working Group. Finally, she is a Dutch delegate of the H2020 Challenge 6 Programme Committee. Strengthening the research infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities is another core task that she pursues in several international capacities: ESFRI Strategic Working Group Social and Cultural Innovation; Governing Board of the CLARIN ERIC and of the DARIAH ERIC; Stakeholder Advisory Board of E-RIHS. As of October 2019, she has extended her infrastructure responsibilities to cover the whole research domain.

Heide Hackmann is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Science Council (ISC). She was the Executive Director of the two organisations that merged, in July 2018, to form the ISC: the International Council for Science, from 2015 to July 2018, and of the International Social Science Council for eight years before that. Heide holds a M.Phil in contemporary social theory from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria) and a member of several international advisory committees and boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Germany), the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (Germany), the Excellence, Impact and Engagement Committee of the Oceans Frontier Institute (Canada) and the African Open Science Platform. In addition she is a member and past co-chair of the UN’s 10 Member Group supporting the Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM) on the Sustainable Development Goals.

John Hegarty has 40 years of experience in research, education and university leadership spanning Ireland and the US. Following a PhD in Physics from University College Galway in 1975, he spent ten years carrying out research in the US, at the University of Wisconsin Madison Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In 1986, he was appointed Professor of Laser Physics at Trinity College Dublin where he co-founded Optronics Ireland (1989), a national inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional research programme, and campus company Eblana Photonics (2001). Following periods as Head of the Physics Department and Dean of Research, he was appointed President/Provost of Trinity College Dublin in 2001 for 10 years, a period of significant expansion in research and collaboration across disciplines and institutions. He co-founded Innovation Advisory Partners (2012), acted as Senior Advisor to the President of Skoltech, a start-university in Moscow, and reviewed Higher Education in Kazakhstan as member of the OECD expert Group (2015).  He is chair of the Irish Times Trust and member of the Irish Times Board, member of the Irish Fulbright Commission, Hugh Lane Gallery, C-Path Ireland, and the NUIG President’s Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and Fellow of the Institute of Physics and has Honorary Degrees from UCD, QUB and UU. He has published 130 research papers and holds three patents. Currently, he is co-authoring with colleagues at MIT and KTH a book on knowledge exchange as a driver for societal and particularly economic development.

Christoph Köller is a co-founder and managing partner of Görgen & Köller GmbH (G&K), a science consultancy company based in Germany. He supports research institutions which intend to turn their research into innovation and start-ups. He has developed and applied innovation evaluation and management methodologies as well as innovation processes which find widespread use by his clients. He conducted various projects in innovation management and knowledge transfer with major research facilities from Fraunhofer Society, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Leibniz Association, and universities. His work is focussed on creating innovation and impact of social sciences, humanities and the arts (SSHA) research. Based on that he is frequently invited as an expert or speaker to workshops and symposia for knowledge transfer and innovation from SSHA. He also acts as a director of the ASTP/PraxisAuril-teaching course ‘Knowledge Exchange in Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts’. Furthermore, he belongs to several pools of experts and evaluators on SSHA knowledge transfer in Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain and Finland. He is member of ASTP (EUR), AUTM (USA), ISPIM (EUR), TII (EUR), and TransferAllianz (DE). He established and leads a special interest group on social sciences and humanities knowledge at ASTP. Christoph holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration and Marketing.

Premesh Lalu is Professor of History and Founding Director of the DST-NRF Flagship Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Following an MA from the University of the Western Cape, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Doctoral Fellowship to read towards a doctorate in History at the University of Minnesota. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to convene a fellowship programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa. He has published widely in academic journals on historical discourse and the Humanities in Africa and his writing has appeared in newspapers and online. He is co-editor of Remains of the Social: Desiring the Post-Apartheid (2017) and Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacies (2012). Lalu is a board member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes, former chairperson of the Handspring Trust for Puppetry in Education, and former trustee of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. As director of the CHR, he is Principal Investigator for the DST-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities and has served as PI on seven major Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants at the University of the Western Cape. With colleagues at the CHR, he hosted the international annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and co-convened the Global Humanities Curriculum Workshop with Homi Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Institute at Harvard University.

Gabi Lombardo PhD is the Director of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (www.eassh.eu), the largest advocacy and science policy organisation for social sciences and humanities in Europe.  She is an expert in both higher education and global research policy, and has extensive high-level experience operating at the interface of strategy, science policy, research support and funding. Gabi has senior level experience in strategic and ‘foresight’ planning in elite higher education institutions, international research funders and associations, having worked with the London School of Economics (LSE), the European Research Council (ERC) and Science Europe (SE).

As Director of EASSH, Gabi advocates also for the need for a strong evidence-based approach to policy-making, and the inclusion of researchers in science policy development for strategic and broad-based research funding. She is an expert evaluator for SSH disciplines and research ethics for the EU Commission, World Bank, WISE and COST. In November 2018, Gabi received the Young Academy of Europe Annual Prize.

Michael O’Rourke is Professor of Philosophy and faculty in AgBioResearch and Environmental Science & Policy at Michigan State University. He is Director of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity (http://c4i.msu.edu/) and Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an NSF-sponsored research initiative that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research and implements them across a broad range of contexts (http://tdi.msu.edu/). His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of environmental science, communication and epistemic integration in collaborative, cross-disciplinary research, and linguistic communication between intelligent agents. He has published extensively on the topics of communication, interdisciplinary theory and practice, and robotic agent design. He has been a co-principal investigator or collaborator on funded projects involving environmental science education, facilitating cross-disciplinary communication, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, resilience in environmental systems, and autonomous underwater vehicles. He co-founded and served as co-director of the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on philosophical themes, and as co-editor of the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series published by MIT Press.

Margit Sutrop is Professor of Practical Philosophy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics at the University of Tartu. She holds an undergraduate degree in journalism, a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Tartu and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Konstanz. Her current research interests include moral and political philosophy, bioethics, business ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of education and ethics of Artificial Intelligence. She has published extensively on ethics and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and is Co-PI on the Horizon 2020 project PRO-RES, which is developing a comprehensive ethics and integrity framework to support RRI in Europe. Professor Sutrop currently acts as an expert for both the European Research Council (ERC) and Horizon 2020 and has previously acted as an ethics expert for the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7). Among her many expert advisory roles, she is a member of the Council of Academia Europaea, the committee of good scientific practice at the Estonian Research Council and the Estonian Education Strategy Commission.

Julie Thompson Klein is Professor of Humanities Emerita in the English Department at Wayne State University (USA) and an International Research Affiliate in the Environmental Systems Science Department at ETH-Zurich (Switzerland). She has also been a Visiting Foreign Professor in Japan, a Fulbright Professor in Nepal, a Foundation Visitor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, a Mellon Fellow and Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Michigan, and a Distinguished Women’s Scholar in residence at the University of Victoria in Canada. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Oregon and is a past president of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) and editor of its journal. Her authored and (co) edited books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990), Interdisciplinary Studies Today (1994), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (2002), Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity (2005), Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures (2010), and Interdisciplining Digital Humanities (2015). She was also Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity (2010, 2017). Her forthcoming book is entitled ‘Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Boundary Work, Communication, and Collaboration in the 21^st Century.’ She consults widely throughout North America, and has spoken on interdisciplinarity throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, Russia, New Zealand and Australia. In addition, she has also advised federal agencies on interdisciplinary research and education while serving on national task forces. Her accomplishments have been recognised in numerous honours, including the Kenneth Boulding Award for outstanding scholarship, Yamamoorthy & Yeh Distinguished Transdisciplinary Achievement Award, and the Science of Team Science Recognition Award. Her work is also the focus of a forthcoming special edition of the AIS journal, on ‘Engaging and Extending the Work of Julie Thompson Klein.’

Sadly, Professor Klein passed away in January of 2023. She is dearly missed by the SHAPE-ID community.

Przemysław Urbańczyk is Professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology (Polish Academy of Sciences) and at the Institute of Archaeology (Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University), and Director of the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIASt). His fields of research include: archaeology and history of the Middle Ages (early states, Christianisation, urbanisation, geopolitics, civic and ecclesiastical architecture) in Poland, Central Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the North Atlantic region; theory of archaeological research, and the methodology of archaeological excavations. His bibliography comprises more than 400 publications including 14 books and 12 monographs, two of which received important prizes. He has edited 10 multi-author volumes and directed several large grants. He is the editor of the 18-volume series ‘Origines Polonorum’ and the 5-volume series ‘The Past Societies. Polish Lands from the First Evidence of Human Presence to the Early Middle Ages’. He is also very active in the field of research policy as a member of expert and review panels and is the founding Director of the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies. He has been a member of international evaluation committees affiliated with, among others, ESF, COST, HERA (Chairman of the review panel). He has served on advisory boards at both national and international level, including the Standing Committee for the Humanities, European Science Foundation; European Union Prize for Culture Heritage, and the Expert Advisory Board for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities at the European Commission and he has served as member of several ERC panels.

Verena Winiwarter is Professor for Environmental History at the Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria. She was first trained as a chemical engineer. After years of working in atmospheric research, she earned her Ph.D. in environmental history at the University of Vienna in 1998. She was granted the venia legendi in Human Ecology in 2003. From 2003-2006 she held a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental history (APART fellowship). At the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Research of Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (IFF) she held the first chair in Environmental History in Austria from 2007 to 2018. From 2010 until 2015 she served as Dean of the faculty. Since 2018 she is Professor for Environmental History at the Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna. She is head of the Centre for Environmental History since 2003. She has been among the founding members of ESEH, the European Society for Environmental History, and served as president of ESEH from 2001 until 2005. She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) since 2011 and serves as President of ICEHO since 2016. She is member of several editorial boards and of the advisory boards of the Centre for Environmental History (University Tallinn), Deutsches Museum (München) and Technisches Museum Wien. A full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she serves there as Chairwoman of the Commission for Interdisciplinary Ecological Studies since 2016. Her main research interests comprise the history of landscapes, in particular rivers, images, and the environmental history of soils. For her work in outreach and public communication, she has been elected as ‘Austrian Scientist of the Year 2013’ in January 2014. She has published numerous articles and edited several books. Full profile information is available here.

Kuba Wygnanski is a sociologist by training. He started his public activity as Solidarity activist in Poland, participating in historic Round Table talks. After 1989, he became deeply involved in numerous initiatives aiming to support civil society in Poland and other countries. He has started several NGOs including the KLON/JAWOR Association (the main support, research and information centre for Polish non-profit centres (www.ngo.pl)) and the Forum of Nongovernmental Initiatives (FIP) which plays a key role as representative of Polish Third Sector. FIP has initiated series of sector-wide debates and meetings including six national forums of several hundred organisations. He was one of the authors and main advocates for the Law on Public Benefit and Voluntarism in Poland. He was initiator and coordinator of a multi-year systemic project on the Polish Model of Social Economy. For over 25 years he has been deeply involved in the research field of the  non-profit sector in Poland. In 2003 he was Yale University – World Fellow. For several years, he was a Board Member of Civicus (Global Alliance for Citizens Participation). Since 2018 he has been a Senior Ashoka Fellow. He is currently a President of the Unit for Social Innovation and Research SHIPYARD. His awards include: Polonia Restituta Cross, Andrzej Bączkowski Award, Polcul Award, Totus Tous Award, Ks.J.Tishner Award.