Advisory Board

Advisory Board provides independent ethical advice and oversight to ensure that all project activities comply with the European Commission Ethics Guidelines, the ERC ethics requirements, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), national legislation, and the highest standards of research integrity.

Aneta Piekut

Senior researcher and lecturer at the Sheffield Methods Institute and Co-Director of the Migration Research Group at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sheffield, UK. With numerous publications on research methods, she has worked extensively on complex ethical issues related to studying migrants, particularly through her involvement in projects like Life at the Frontier. Additionally, she has taught courses on ethics in online surveys and is an active member of the Sheffield Open Research Working Group, which is part of the UK Reproducibility Network.

Remus Gabriel Anghel

Senior researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities in Romania. Over the years, he has conducted research on vulnerable populations, including Romanian irregular migrants in Western Europe and poor, segregated Roma migrant returnees in Romania. This research required balancing interviews, observation, and other fieldwork techniques. He dedicated considerable time to observing and engaging with people, paying attention to conversations and gestures in order to uncover deeper insights into how these individuals’ experienced migration.

Juris Pupčenoks

Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Marist College, New York, has expertise with conducting ethical research involving human subjects. He has completed several training programs regarding ethical concerns and requirements when using human subjects research participants offered by The Collaborative Institutional Research Board Training Initiative (CITI), a leading online training program maintained by the Biomedical Research Alliance of New York, USA. In the past, he has successfully developed several US Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposals aiming to ensure that human subjects are protected before research is conducted for his research studies. 

Anna Vancso

Sociologist based in Hungary. Her research interest focuses on understanding the transformation of the contemporary public sphere by covering issues such as the position of religion, migration, and climate change and the role of the media in shaping the discussion of these issues. She has worked on several national and international projects in the last few years. She teaches the sociology of religion, public policy, and qualitative research methods at different Hungarian universities.

Serhii Pakhomenko

Associate Professor of the Department of International Relations and Foreign Policy of Mariupol State University. In 1996, he graduated from Mariupol State University majoring in History. In 2003, he defended his PhD thesis on "Cultural Development of the Greek Community of Ukraine in the Second Half of the 20th Century" at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). He has 26 years of experience in teaching and research; he teaches disciplines in history, political science, and social communication.

Lenka Dražanova

Social scientist and Research Fellow at the European University Institute’s Migration Policy Centre. Her research focuses on understanding some of the key phenomena shaping contemporary societies, including growing polarization around group identities, the rise of authoritarianism, and declining tolerance. Her work lies at the intersection of political science, sociology, and political psychology. Her mainly study public opinion and the formation of individual attitudes — especially toward historically disadvantaged groups —examining the conditions under which these attitudes emerge using advanced quantitative methods.