Defne Over is a sociologist working in the areas of institutional transformation, communication, press freedom, social change, culture and mobilization.

PhD (social and public policy), postdoctoral researcher of social work at University of Helsinki, Finland. Research interests: care, welfare state, emotions, gender (in)equality.

I am interested in the social dimensions of conservation interventions. Since 2018, I have been conducting my interdisciplinary PhD research that focuses on the links between education and biodiversity conservation in Madagascar. I am particularly interested in how conservation NGOs implement education programmes in rural communities in Madagascar and how they affect local cultures, environments and knowledge systems. Through this process, I wish to promote ethical practices in concrete and meaningful ways when doing research, and to bridge the gap between academia and practice.

Elisa Omodei is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University. She holds a BSc and a MSc in Physics from the University of Padua and Bologna, respectively, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics for the Social Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Paris. She carried out her postdoctoral training at the Rovira and Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain. She then spent over four years at the United Nations, first at UNICEF's Office of Innovation in New York and then at the UN World Food Programme in Rome. In her research, she explores how complexity and data science can help us address the needs of the most vulnerable populations and monitor the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She also served as Vice-President Secretary of the Complex Systems Society from 2018 to 2021.