Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. 

Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.

Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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.

Eileen Donahoe is the co-founder and an affiliated scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. (Previously, she served as GDPI’s executive director.) GDPI is a global multi-stakeholder collaboration hub for the development of policies that reinforce human rights and democratic values in a digitized society. Current research priorities include: international trends in AI governance, technical methods for aligning AI with democratic norms and standards, evolution of digital authoritarian policies and practices, and emerging blockchain and AI-enabled tools to support democracy.

Eileen served in the Biden administration as US Special Envoy for Digital Freedom at the Department of State. She also served in the Obama administration as the first US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva during a period of significant institutional reform and innovation. After the Obama administration, she joined Human Rights Watch as Director of Global Affairs, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity, and internet governance. Earlier in her career, she was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

Eileen serves as Vice Chair of the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors; on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Board of Directors; and on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees. She is a member of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), the World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance, and the Resilient Governance and Regulation working group. Previously, she served on the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, the University of Essex Advisory Board on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology, the NDI Designing for Democracy Advisory Board, and the Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network. Degrees: BA, Dartmouth; J.D., Stanford Law School; MA East Asian Studies, Stanford; M.T.S., Harvard; and Ph.D., Ethics & Social Theory, GTU Cooperative Program with UC Berkeley. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.