Vakarchuk is a Ukrainian civic activist, musician and the lead vocalist and founder of the band “Okean Elzy.“ He will be in residence at CDDRL this fall to attend courses and study with some of the leading intellectuals and academics at CDDRL. He holds a doctorate degree in theoretical physics from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.

Vakarchuk is also the founder of a charity fund called “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future) and co-founder of the Center for Economic Strategy, an independent policy think tank dedicated to supporting reforms and sustainable economic growth in Ukraine. He served as a Yale World Fellow in 2015.

Dmytro Romanovych works at the Reform Delivery Office for the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. With a team of project managers, they work directly with the prime minister by facilitating reforms, monitoring progress and coordinating across ministries. The Reform Delivery Office focuses on issues of public administration reform, business climate improvement, industrial policy and innovations, healthcare reform and privatization. Romanovych is also an advisor to the Minister of Economy, and is responsible for deregulation and improving the business climate in Ukraine. In addition, he is an economic expert in the largest NGO coalition in Ukraine, the Reanimation Package of Reforms, which is the most influential non-governmental reform advocate in the country.

Romanovych's key responsibility is to ensure the Cabinet of Ministers and Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s Parliament) both adopt Ukraine's deregulation agenda. This includes developing the concept of the deregulation documents, involvement and coordination of the stakeholders, passing documents through approval process, public promotion, etc. Due largely in part to its deregulation reform, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade was recognized as a leader in the reform process in comparison with other ministries Over the last year, Romanovych has organized several high-level meetings that have resulted in the adoption of 30 deregulation documents, the abolishment of 500 regulations and the passing of draft laws on state control system reform by the Verkhovna Rada. Prior to this he was among the creators of the Better Regulation Delivery Office institution, which is now is the key think-tank and task force for business climate improvement and restructuring of the government policy-making process. Romanovych graduated from Kharkiv State Economic University with a Master’s Degree in Economic Cybernetics.

Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights defender who works on issues in Ukraine and the OSCE region. At present she heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, and also coordinates the work of the initiative group Euromaidan SOS. The activities of the Center for Civil Liberties are aimed at protecting human rights and establishing democracy in Ukraine and the OSCE region. The organization is developing legislative changes, exercises public oversight over law enforcement agencies and judiciary, conducts educational activities for young people and implements international solidarity programs. 

The Euromaidan SOS initiative group was created in response to the brutal dispersal of a peaceful student rally in Kyiv on November 30, 2013. During three months of mass protests that were called the Revolution of Dignity, several thousand volunteers provided round-the-clock legal and other aid to persecuted people throughout the country. Since the end of the protests and beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the initiative has been monitoring political persecution in occupied Crimea, documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the hybrid war in the Donbas and conducting the “LetMyPeopleGo” international campaign to release political prisoners detained by the Russian authorities. 

Oleksandra Matviichuk has experience in creating horizontal structures for massive involvement of people in human rights activities against attacks on rights and freedoms, as well as a multi-year practice of documenting violations during armed conflict. She is the author of a number of alternative reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and the International Criminal Court. In 2016 she received the Democracy Defender Award for "Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights" from missions to the OSCE.

Olexandr Starodubtsev is a Ukrainian reformer who is deeply involved in the creation of a new electronic public procurement system Prozorro, which is one of the most famous reforms in the country. Currently Starodubtsev is the Head of the Public Procurement Regulation Department in The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine, and is an official policy maker in the spheres of public procurement and economic development in Ukraine.

The Prozorro system is famous for its different approaches to bottom-up reform based on the close collaboration between government, business and civil society. In 2016, the Prozorro system won several distinguished international awards, such as the Open Government Partnership Award, the Public Procurement Award, and was also recognized by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and Open Contracting Partnership. Moreover, Prozorro and its principles became an inspirational example for other Ukrainian reforms.

Starodubtsev was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1979. He graduated from Kharkiv National University in 2002. Previously he worked on the stock market where he made his career as a back-office specialist up to a managing partner of a Ukrainian branch of a multinational financial institution. He received an MBA degree from the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and became Alumnus of the Year in its first competition in 2015. He is married and has a son and a daughter.

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian specializing in the History of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and Modern Turkey. Currently he is serving as the director of the Abbasi Program of Islamic Studies and the Middle East Studies Forum.

His research focuses on different dimensions of political, economic, and legal institutions and practices, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Yaycıoğlu is particularly intrigued by visions, representations, and documentation of concepts like property, territory, and nature in early periods. His is also interested in the application of digital tools to comprehend, visualize, and conceptualize these historical perspectives. Dr. Yaycıoğlu offers courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Empires, Markets, and Networks in the Early Modern World, Global History of the Age of Revolutions, Doing Economic History, and Digital Humanities.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016), reevaluates the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He also co-edited the Ottoman Digital Humanities Special Issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies (2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston, 2023). Dr. Yaycıoğlu's essays on the history and contemporary affairs of the Republic of Turkey were published in his Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (in Turkish, Istanbul, 2024).

Currently, he is immersed in two book projects: Karlowitz Moment: The Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern World, 1699-1839, a reconsideration of the Ottoman experience in the global context during the long eighteenth century and The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, analyzing property, finance, and Ottoman statehood in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu is the co-editor of the Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature and Knowledge also oversees a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus, housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Dr. Yaycıoğlu earned degrees in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University and Ottoman History from Bilkent University. Further studies led him to McGill University in Montreal, where he focused on Arabic and Islamic legal history. He completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2008, followed by post-doctoral studies in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and later in Hellenic Studies at Princeton. He Joined the History Department at Stanford in 2011. Dr. Yaycıoğlu regularly writes opinion pieces in Gazete Oksijen and other venues in Turkish and English on History and contemporary politics, mainly focusing on Turkey and the Middle East. In parallel with his academic pursuits, Dr. Yaycıoğlu is engaged in visual arts under the name "Critical Imagination," conducting artistic work in Palo Alto and Istanbul through the Atölye20 platform.

Vicky Fouka is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. She is a political economist with interests in group identity and intergroup relations, culture, and historical social dynamics. Her articles are published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Politics, the Economic Journal, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Nature Human Behaviour. Her work has received the Joseph L. Bernd award for best paper published in the Journal of Politics, the Economic Journal Austin Robinson prize, and the best article award of the APSA Migration and Citizenship section. She holds a PhD in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University.

Fouka's research was featured in The Europe Center April 2018 Newsletter.