steering committee

martin vokálek
Czechia – Linkedin
Martin Vokálek holds a master’s degree in International Politics and Diplomacy from the Faculty of International Relations of the Prague University of Economics and Business (VŠE v Praze) and an MBA degree from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland and the Prague University of Economics and Business, Czechia. His minor was Project Management, and he has also completed courses in Management and Law at the Management Centre Innsbruck, Austria. He has participated for several years in the European Youth Parliament and the Czech Student Union, was a Vice President and Member of the Academic Senate, and has co-founded the Czech chapter of the student transatlantic think-tank European Horizons. For several years, he collaborated on the project of CERMAT, worked at the Institute of International Relations and other institutions, served as the Finance Manager at the International Sustainable Finance Centre, and was active also in the private sector.
He is currently the Executive Director of the EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy, having started there as the Office and Project Manager in 2016. He is interested in economic issues, European security and NATO, hybrid threats, war crimes and international law problematic.

michal vašečka
Slovakia – profile
Doc. PhDr. Michal Vašečka, PhD. (1972) is sociologist by background and focuses his interests on issues of ethnicity, race, antisemitism, and migration studies. As an Associate Professor he operates at the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) since 2015, he is a program director of Bratislava Policy Institute. Since 2012 Michal Vašečka serves as a representative of Slovakia in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) of the Council of Europe. He operated at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno in 2002-2017 and at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the Comenius University in 2006-2009.

Dániel róna
Hungary – Linkedin
Dániel Róna, Ph.D. (1984), political scientist, the director of the 21 Research Center. He was the recipient of the Kolnai Aurél Prize in 2017 for his doctoral dissertation on the far-right party of Jobbik – which has also been published in a book format.
His special interests are research methodology, public opinion polling, and voter behaviour. He has several publications on these topics. Also, he taught at the Corvinus University of Budapest between 2009 and 2021. He studied in Rotterdam having gained an Erasmus Scholarship in 2007. He received the Sasakawa Scholarship in 2013. He was researching at Berkeley after gaining a Fulbright Scholarship in 2018. He obtained a three-year Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, between 2017 and 2020.
He worked for the Hungarian Election Research Program in 2009, and a governmental background institution – Institute for Public Policy Research – from 2010 to 2012. He was the research director at the Action and Protection Foundation between 2016 and 2019. In 2017, he contributed to László Botka’s campaign and later worked on several occasions for Gergely Karácsony’s campaign. In 2021, he was part of Péter Márki-Zay’s campaign team, and in recent years, he has supported the work of the Momentum Movement.
Under his leadership, in 2024, the 21 Research Center conducted Hungary’s most accurate election survey ahead of the European Parliamentary elections, using a pioneering methodology introduced to the country for the first time.
He is an enthusiastic football fan: he regularly attends the matches of the Hungarian national team and a Budapest-based club, MTK. He also likes playing football, running, swimming, going to the gym and recently he also started orienteering. He is married. In January 2024, he welcomed the birth of his daughter, Zoé.

Miłosz hodun
Poland – profile
Miłosz is the President of the Projekt: Polska Foundation and member of the Board of Directors of the European Liberal Forum. Author and editor of various publications on hate speech and populism, e.g. US/THEM. Hate Speech at the Service of Politics; Free Voices. LGBT+ Rights in Eastern Europe; Beyond Flt Earth. Conspiracy Theory vs. European Liberals. Visiting adjunct professor at Reykjavik University Law

Martin buchtík
Czechia
Martin is a sociologist and, since 2018, the director of the STEM analytical institute. He focuses on topics related to the dynamically changing society in a broader context and other issues such as public opinion formation, quality of life, cohesion and inequality. In the past, he directed the Centre for Public Opinion Research at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He completed his doctoral studies at Charles University with a focus on sociological research methodology.