Mehdi Shiva is a research leader at the RAND Europe. Prior to joining RAND, he led the economics research and policy agenda at GO Lab (University of Oxford), performed as a health economist at the University of Dundee/Ninewells Hospital and as a research director for an entrepreneurial company in collaboration with the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). Shiva has also done some fellowship and consultancy work in the international development sector with NGOs. He holds PhD (Dundee), MSc (PSE, Paris 1), and BSc (Tehran) degrees in Economics.

Licia Cianetti is a researcher studying democracy in ethnocultural diverse and divided societies. She is the author of "The Quality of Divided Democracies: Minority Inclusion, Exclusion, and Representation in the New Europe" (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and co-editor of "Rethinking 'Democratic Backsliding' in Central and Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2019). She is currently working on the research project "What Happened to the Multicultural City? Effects of Austerity and Nativism", funded by the Leverhulme Trust: www.multiculturalcities.com. She has a regional expertise in Eastern Europe and works on urban policies of inclusion and city-to-city policy exchange networks.

I am a BCG Senior Partner (Managing Director and Senior Partner with Boston Consulting Group) working specialized in human capital development including education, education for employment, labor market and women economic empowerment.

International security expert with a professional background in research and teaching/training. My work focuses on international cooperation and state strategies towards violent non-state actors and their various illicit activities, micro dynamics of irregular conflicts, and Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. I hold a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews (Scotland, UK) where I explored Russian counterterrorist tactics applied in the North Caucasus, and a MA in Political Science from the Southern Federal University (Russia). I am a proficient user of R, SPSS, selected Adobe Creative Cloud applications, and fluent in English and Russian. Professional duties include data-focused research and design/management of a regional N-large data-sets on micro dynamics of violent non-state actors. Building on experience of working as a graphic designer, I enrich presentation and enhance perception of research outcomes by its visualisation through relevant graphic forms including maps, illustrations, and graphs produced in R, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, or hand-drawn creative images.