FREEDOM OF
RESEARCH

Stefan Böschen is a sociologist of technology one of the two directors of c:o/re. He holds the “Society and Technology” chair at the Human Technology Center (HumTec), RWTH Aachen University. He is a spokesperson for HumTec and Rector’s Delegate for Leonardo, an awarded project at the same university, which aims to foster interdisciplinarity, responsibility and participation in academic teaching. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. From 2009 to 2010 he stood-in for the chair of Sociology of Science at Bielefeld University. After working at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at Karlsruher Institute of Technology, he became Chair of Society and Technology at RWTH Aachen University in 2018. Stefan Böschen is also chairman of the Committee for Risk Research and Risk Perception at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and a member of the research project group on interdisciplinary reflections on science at the German Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina. His research encompasses science and technology studies, technology assessment, collaborative research and innovation action, knowledge and democracy.

Elena Bruni is a Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Organization at LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy. Her research examines the linguistic and multimodal processes that drive organizational and societal change, focusing on science denialism, vaccine hesitancy, institutional distrust, and practices occurring in morally ambiguous contexts. In 2024, she was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2020 to 2021, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at WU Vienna, where she led a project on the discursive and multimodal dynamics of vaccine hesitancy. Her work has been published in journals including Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, and Long Range Planning. She is also co-editor of Organized Science Denial: An Action Plan for Solutions (Oxford University Press). Caroline is also a columnist for Foreign Policy, EUobserver and De Standaard, and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously based in the Gaza strip, Jerusalem, Brussels, Geneva, Vienna and Oslo. She has written several books including, most recently, a best-selling comparison between the Habsburg Empire and the European Union which has been published in six languages.

Olga Ceran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis Interdisciplinary Research Institute (Belgium) and a Guest Researcher at the Europa Institute of Leiden University (the Netherlands). Her current research examines academic freedom as a legal right in Europe, with a particular focus on Article 13 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (“freedom of the arts and sciences”) and the EU’s role in its protection. Olga is a former re:constitution Fellow and Mellon/SAR Academic Freedom Fellow. She has contributed to the 2024 and 2025 European Parliament Academic Freedom Monitors and serves as Co-Manager of the Research Network on Academic Freedom. She is also active in the open science movement and is committed to equitable access to knowledge and to fostering a supportive academic environment. Her broader research interests include comparative law, European human rights law, and Europeanisation, particularly in areas where the EU has limited competences. She holds a PhD in Law and an LLM in Comparative, European and International Laws from the European University Institute in Florence, as well as a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Wrocław (Poland).

Prof. Dr. Hylke Dijkstra is the Maastricht University Europe Chair and Professor of International Security and Cooperation (Hoogleraar in Internationale Veiligheid en Samenwerking). He is an expert in European affairs, European security, multilateralism and international organizations. He studies how increasing geopolitics affects prospects for international cooperation, and what this means for Europe. As the UM Europe Chair (from September 2026), Hylke Dijkstra spearheads one of the four strategic research themes "Europe and a Globalising World" of Maastricht University and provides academic leadership to Studio Europa. Until August 2026, he serves as the Director of the Research Programme Europe: Society, Politics and Global Order (ESPO). Hylke Dijkstra is the Project Coordinator of the Horizon project ENSURED on how the EU and its member states can transform global governance. He is also the Project Coordinator of KNOWSEC-NL about research security in a geopolitical world. He is a member of the Standing Committee on European Integration of the Advisory Council on International Affairs (Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken).

Professor Gabriele Gramelsberger is a philosopher of science and technology one of the two directors of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re). Since 2017, she holds the Chair for Theory of Science and Technology at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the RWTH Aachen University. She is a member of the RWTH Human Technology Center and serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the RWTH Aachen University. In 2019 she became a regular member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities and the Arts. Her research is devoted to the digitalization of science. Her aim is to develop a conceptual framework for Philosophy of Computational Sciences as well as an open science infrastructure for Computational Science Studies. In 2018 she founded the Computational Social Systems Lab, supported by the NRW Digital Fellowship 2017. In 2023, she received the K. Jon Barwise Prize 2023 for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by the American Philosophical Association.

Since 2014, Julia Hagel has been working as a moderator for conferences, events, panel discussions or video productions for e.g., the ministry of economics Baden-Wuerttemberg (BaWü), Karlsruhe Insitute of Technology, Technical University of Munich, Technical University of Berlin, or the environmental ministry BaWü. The focus of her moderations lies on topics like science and sustainability. During her moderations she always strives to make complex topics accessible for everyone. She holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration and works as a Consumer Insights Manager at Bosch Siemens Home Appliances.

Jürgen Janger works as a senior economist at the Austrian institute of economic research, where he has also been research group coordinator and deputy director for research in rotating management roles. His research focus is on the economics of science and innovation, including determinants of research and innovation performance such as knowledge transfer. He has more than 20 years’ experience in research and innovation policy studies and evaluations for the European Commission, EU framework programmes, the OECD, the Swiss Science Council, the German Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation, the Austrian government and many more. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the large scale FP7 project WWWforEurope, a main contributor to the MORE surveys and to the Knowledge Ecosystems project. Recently, he was an expert for the mutual learning exercise on research careers, coordinated the independent review of the EU industrial R&D scoreboard (GLORIA) and contributed to the Horizon SECURE project on researchers’ careers. He published in leading journals such as Research Policy, Higher Education and Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Professor Cyrus Mody is an historian of recent science and technology, specifically the applied physical sciences in the United States since 1965. He studies the commercialization of academic research, the longue durée of responsible research and innovation (RRI), and the technopolitics of scarcity in the long 1970s. For 2020-2025, Prof. Mody is the principal investigator for an NWO (Netherland Organisation for Scientific Research) Vici grant, "Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity" (https://managingscarcity.com/). Other team members are Odinn Melsted (postdoc), Michiel Bron (PhD candidate, oil and nuclear energy project), and Jelena Stankovic (PhD candidate, oil and solar energy project). In parallel, Prof. Mody is a co-PI in the ERC Synergy grant "Nanobubbles" along with colleagues @_Nano_Bubbles (https://nanobubbles.hypotheses.org/). This project seeks to understand why the scientific record is so difficult to correct and how scientists are able to ignore contradictory evidence. The aim is to foster a healthier scientific dialogue in which contradictory evidence can be debated and errors corrected without fear of repercussions.

Since 2019, Thomas Prefi has been Chairman of the Foundation of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen. He studied mechanical engineering at RWTH Aachen University from 1984 to 1990, where he obtained his doctorate in 1995 and habilitated in 2002. He is co-founder, former CEO and member of the Supervisory Board of ‘Umlaut SE’ (formerly ‘P3 group AG’) - which has been part of Accenture since 2021 - and contributes to the strategic direction of the company. Professor Dr Prefi holds an associate professorship for production metrology and quality management at RWTH Aachen University.

Agnes Radziwon is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Radziwon’s expertise is in innovation and technology management. As a scholar, she is looking into a broader perspective of inter-organizational collaboration in various types of (eco)systems. She is interested in the ways knowledge is transferred across organizations, the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation, and how institutions codify ideas and practices. She has published several highly cited articles concerning open innovation, open innovation in science, and ecosystems. She is a co-author of the Oxford Handbook on Open Innovation (OUP, 2024).

Carsten Reinhardt is Professor for Historical Studies of Science at the University of Bielefeld, and co-director of the university’s Institute of Studies of Science (ISoS). He took his PhD on chemical research at BASF and Hoechst between 1863 and 1914 at the Technical University of Berlin in 1996. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Regensburg between 1997 and 2005 and was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in 2006-7, joining the faculty of the University of Bielefeld in 2007. From 2013 to 2016, he was President and CEO of the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, USA. Between 2014 and 2023, Reinhardt has co-directed the research program on the history of the Max Planck Society.

For his co-authored book Residues. Thinking Through Chemical Environments, Rutgers UP 2022, Reinhardt received the 2023 Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociology Association (Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section). In 2024, he received the Morris Award of the Society for the History of Chemistry, recognizing scholarly achievement in the History of Modern Chemistry or the History of the Chemical Industry. From 2017 to 2021, he has been the President of the Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, der Medizin und der Technik (GWMT). Reinhardt is member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europeae. In 2011, he was professeur invité at the Ecole Normale Supèrieure, Paris, and in 2024-25 fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Cultures of Research at RWTH Aachen. Reinhardt's overall research fields are the history of chemistry, industrial research, scientific instrumentation, regulatory science, and expert knowledge during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his latest project, together with Helmut Maier (Wuppertal), Reinhardt explores the history of German governmental research agencies from World War I to the Cold War era, with a focus on National Socialism and World War II. These agencies, in the fields of chemistry, physics, geology, and material sciences, were responsible for research and regulation in a wide range of functions from the exploration of raw materials through the setting of standards to the testing of materials used for armament. Being key institutions of a totalitarian regime, they represented a science for autarky and war.

Monika has been Deputy Secretary General of EUA since October 2021. In this role, she shares strategic oversight of different elements of EUA’s work and contributes to the Association’s organisational development, including membership management and services as well as strategic and operational planning. She also leads EUA’s activities on academic freedom and university values, having participated in and contributed to many related initiatives and expert groups. Monika has been with EUA since 2010, initially in the Governance, Autonomy and Funding unit where she implemented EUA’s flagship Autonomy Scorecard project.

Matthias Wessling has been Vice Rector for Transfer at RWTH Aachen University since 2018. He has also headed the Chair of Chemical Process Engineering (AVT.CVT) at RWTH Aachen University since 2010.