Kamil Łuczaj is a sociologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź, and a member of the Committee on Migration Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on higher education, migration, and social inequalities, with particular attention to class and ethnic minority status in academic institutions. He is the Principal Investigator of the BRAINY project, which examines the biographies and academic imaginaries of Polish scholars working abroad. He has held visiting research positions at the University of Cambridge, the University of New Mexico, and the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His work has been published in journals including Research in Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and Advances in Life Course Research.

Adél Pásztor is Associate Professor of Sociology and Head of the Institute of Social and Political Sciences at Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research focuses on social inequality and stratification in higher education, with particular interests in social mobility, access to elite universities, international student mobility, doctoral education, and academic careers. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, she examines how social background, institutional contexts, and national and global hierarchies shape educational opportunities and trajectories.

Before returning to Corvinus in 2021, she held academic and research positions in the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy, including at Newcastle University, the University of Amsterdam, and the European University Institute, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford. She is an Associate Editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education and a member of the Supervisory Board of the Hungarian Sociological Association. She is also a founding member of EducEight, an international network focused on educational and social inequalities, and previously founded and chaired the Career Development Group of the Marie Curie Alumni Association where she led a large-scale career survey of Marie Curie fellows.

Zdeněk R. Nešpor is a sociologist and a historian, regular fellow of Czech Academy – The Learned Society of the Czech Republic. He works as a senior researcher in the Institute of Sociology CAS and a full professor at the Charles University’s Faculty of Humanities. He was a visiting professor at the EHESS (Paris, France) in 2006, a Fulbright scholar at the University of California in Santa Barbara (USA) in 2007, and a research fellow at the University of Munich (Germany) in 2023. His main fields of interest are history and sociology of religions, sociology of culture and history of sociology. Regarding the latter, Nešpor led the team that elaborated the Dictionary of Czech Sociologists (2013) and History of Czech Sociology (2014). He is also editor-in-chief of the online Czech Sociological Encyclopaedia. Nešpor has published over 20 academic books and over 200 academic articles.

Miloslav Bahna is a sociologist focusing on international migration, quantitative comparative sociology, and quantitative survey methodology. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, where he currently serves as its director. He represents Slovakia in the comparative survey series International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and in the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN), analyzing linked employer-employee data in Europe and the US. He authored several books and highly cited articles in leading journals and publishers.

Roman Hofreiter is a sociologist and Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Arts, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica. He completed his PhD studies in Sociology in Bratislava and undertook study and research stays at the University of Vienna, Faculty of Social Sciences, and the University of Nottingham, School of Social Policy. His research focuses primarily on survey research, quantitative data analysis, and the sociology of health. In the past, he also worked on topics in economic sociology. Until 2026, he also served as Chair of the Slovak Sociological Association.

Colby R. King is a Professor of Sociology at USC Upstate in Spartanburg, SC, USA and was a 2025–2026 EkSoc Fellow in the Faculty of Economics and Sociology at the University of Lodz, Poland.

His teaching and research focuses on social inequality, urban sociology, employment and regional labor markets, and first-generation and working-class college students. Working with a wide variety of collaborators, Dr. King has published research on employment shifts across occupations in deindustrialized metropolitan regions in the Journal of Urban Affairs, how class backgrounds shape faculty career pipelines in Socius, how liberal arts curriculum supports STEM major retention and graduation in Science & Education, and supporting first-generation college student success in Teacher-Scholar. He also served as the lead organizer and guest co-editor of the 2023 special issue of the journal Teaching Sociology on teaching sociology by, for, and about first-generation and working-class people. He serves as a co-PI on the ongoing NSF-funded S-STEM CRISPR program (NSF Project ID 2221262) at USC Upstate and served as a co-PI on the NSF-funded S-STEM SEISMIC program at Bridgewater State University (NSF Project ID 1643475).

Katarzyna Krakowska is a sociologist and PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences, University of Lodz. She is a researcher in the BRAINY project (Biography and Academic Imaginary) and Principal Investigator of the NCN PRELUDIUM project Ukrainian Women Aged 60+ in Exile: Autobiographical Narratives of Forced Migrant Lives (UMO-2025/57/N/HS6/01879). Her research interests include social inequalities, academic mobility, migration, and biographical experiences in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2024, she received the Zygmunt Bauman Award of the Polish Sociological Association for the co-authored book Flammable Society: Practices of Helping War Refugees from Ukraine in Poland in 2022. Her doctoral research focuses on the biographical experiences of older Ukrainian women displaced to Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.