Silvio Waisbord is Director and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. His most recent books are Communication: A Post-Discipline and The Communication Manifesto (both published by Polity Press in 2019), as well as El Imperio de las utopías: Ocho ensayos sobre la sociedad estadounidense (2020) on the American society. He has published close to 200 articles on investigative journalism, media scandals, communication studies, media policy, and global social change in academic journals in several languages.

He is past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics. He has lectured in universities in more than forty countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. He holds a Licenciatura in sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, San Diego. 

Silvio Waisbord has twice visited St.Petersburg State University with keynote speeches and guest lectures, and he has for several years served as the THEORY track chair at CMSTW.

Ingrid Volkmer is a leading researcher on transnational communication, media and health, global risks and journalism, and youth communication. She currently directs the Global Youth Survey for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 'Social Media & COVID-19 - a Global Study of Digital Crisis Interaction among Gen Z and Millenials.' In 2020, she has also created a large international research network, the Global Risk Journalism Hub, that includes a transnational research network of eighty leading journalism scholars of 30+ countries, as well as media and public institutions.

Professor Volkmer held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Harvard, MIT, University of Vienna, and the University of Amsterdam. She was engaged in digital policy debates at the OECD in 2018 and was appointed to the OECD's expert panel on AI governance in 2019 and to the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) as a Lead Author in transnational digital communication. The role of the latter panel is to develop policy frameworks for governments worldwide to tackle the major social challenges of the 21st Century.

Among her recent publications are the book Risk Journalism between Transnational Politics and Climate Change (co-authored with Kasim Sharif) (Palgrave, New York, 2018) and the chapter The Transnationalization of Public Sphere and Global Policy in the Oxford Handbook on Global Policy and Transnational Administration (Oxford University Press, 2019).