James Jordan

News Director

James Jordan is the News Director for Europe and Africa for The Associated Press where he oversees more than 30 bureaux and nearly 300 journalists in all formats. He has overseen the global news agency’s award-winning coverage from Ukraine and interviewed Zelenskyy twice – most recently in November, when he traveled to Kupiansk with the president. Before joining The AP in 2016, James worked at ITV News and Sky News in senior newsgathering roles. He has run teams in Iraq, Tunisia and in Paris following the terror attacks. He began his career as a print reporter at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, in North East England.

Yana Nikolova

Foreign Correspondent

Yana Nikolova is an international editor for Nova TV Bulgaria. She was a special correspondent for Nova in Brussels and Strasbourg for the European Elections in 2014. Recently she has been covering some major events in Europe such as the war in Ukraine, the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the Coronation of King Charles III. Yana participated in the WPI fellowship in 2018.

Andras Petho

Investigative Journalist

Andras Petho is co-founder and executive director of Direkt36, an investigative journalism center in Hungary. Direkt36, which was launched in 2015, is one of the few Hungarian journalism organizations that are not controlled by pro-government forces and other political interest groups. During his 20-year-long career, Andras was a senior editor for leading Hungarian news site Origo, worked for the BBC World Service in London, and was a reporter at the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He was a World Press Institute fellow in 2008, a Humphrey fellow at the University of Maryland in 2012/13, and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2019/20.

Tarek F. Kai

War Correspondent

Tarek F. Kai is a French-Lebanese senior reporter at France 24 tv channel. Tarek has covered war zones in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. He narrated the Arab Spring uprisings in countries like Tunisia and Syria and the democracy protests in countries like Sudan and Lebanon. He has covered several presidential and parliamentary elections in Europe and has interviewed world leaders in major events like the UN General Assembly in New York and other international summits. Among the major stories he has covered during the past recent years: the World Economic Forum in Davos, the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, the mid-terms elections in the US, the war in Ukraine, the first anniversary of the fall of Kabul to Taliban, the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Beirut’s port explosion.

Thomas Hanson

Diplomat

Thomas Hanson is a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State whose diplomatic postings included East Germany, France, Norway, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. He also participated in the opening of new U.S. embassies in Mongolia and Estonia, worked on the Foreign Relations Committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and served as Director for NATO and European Affairs at the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, D.C. Mr. Hanson currently is Diplomat in Residence at the Alworth Institute for International Affairs at the University of Minnesota – Duluth and has taught diplomacy at Carleton College. He also serves as Chair of the Minnesota Committee on Foreign Relations and as Co-Chair of the Minnesota China Business Council.

David Schultz

Professor of Political Science and Law

David Schultz is Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Political Science, Environmental Studies, and Legal Studies at Hamline University. He is also an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and at the University of St. Thomas, and an affiliate faculty member at the Lithuanian Military Academy in Vilnius, Lithuania. A four-time Fulbright scholar who has taught extensively in Europe and Asia, and the winner of the Leslie A. Whittington national award for excellence in public affairs teaching, David is the author of more than 45 books and 200+ articles on various aspects of American politics, election law, and the media and politics, and he is regularly interviewed and quoted in the media on these subjects including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Economist, and National Public Radio.

Camilla Bath

Journalism Consultant

Camilla Bath is a journalism consultant, trainer and innovator with a dynamic career spanning two decades in the news media industry, bridging continents, cultures and industries. As a co-founder of Future Media Lab, she works with newsrooms across Africa and in Europe with a focus on artificial intelligence, broadcast journalism, and fact-checking. Camilla is a board member of the World Press Institute, having herself been a recipient of a WPI fellowship in 2014.

Jane Kirtley

Professor of Media Ethics and Law

Professor Jane E. Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, and directs The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. Kirtley is also an affiliated faculty member at the University of Minnesota Law School. She was a Fulbright Scholar teaching U.S. media law and media ethics at the University of Latvia’s Law Faculty in Riga during Spring 2016. Kirtley has written friend-of-the-court briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as two books, many book chapters, and articles for scholarly journals and for the popular and professional press, including The New York Times, The Conversation, and the Guardian (UK). Kirtley was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2015, and is a long-time member of the board of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

Patrik Szicherle

Political Analyst & Researcher

Patrik Szicherle is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Democracy & Resilience in Bratislava. He is taking part in research on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), and the development of policy recommendations on countering hybrid threats. Previously, he was with Political Capital Institute in Budapest. Besides doing research on foreign-driven and homegrown disinformation, he also contributed to analyses on European affairs and Hungarian foreign policy. He has experience in researching inauthentic online behavior. Patrik has Bachelor’s degrees in English from ELTE in Budapest and in European Studies from the University of Southern Denmark. He earned a Master’s degree in International Relations from ELTE.

Madalina Voinea

Digital Research Analyst

Madalina Voinea is an analyst from Romania with expertise in digital monitoring, international relations, and political analysis. She graduated from the Faculty of History in Bucharest with a specialization in International Relations and European Studies. She has been involved in monitoring research projects such as the monitoring of Hungarian elections and Fidesz influence in Transylvania in 2022 and anti-Ukraine propaganda watch in Romania. She is also part of the China Watch program, where she participates annually in the China Index, the first program tracking the influence of the People’s Republic of China globally, managed by the Taiwanese think tank, Doublethink Lab.

Fauziyya Tukur

Investigative Journalist

Fauziyya Tukur is an award-winning journalist covering disinformation for the BBC. She covered Nigeria’s 2023 elections where she discovered a sophisticated disinformation campaign by politicians used to sway voter opinion in the country. Her other investigations have uncovered campaigns by separatists and foreign organizations across Africa. She has experience in investigative journalism, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), and attended courses on the rise of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco and New York University Media Lab.