Francesca Lessa is Associate Professor in International Relations of the Americas at University College London (UCL). She is also the Coordinator and Principal Researcher of the Plancondor.org project at UCL, and the Honorary President of the Observatorio Luz Ibarburu in Uruguay. Her book The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America (Yale University Press, 2022) won the 2023 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America (Duke University) and the 2024 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award (Latin American Studies Association). She also co-authored the illustrated book Plan Cóndor: Viejos secretos y nuevos hallazgos (with Sebastián Santana Camargo, Reservoir Books, 2025, 2nd edition).

Marcus Michaelsen, PhD, is a researcher studying digital technologies, human rights activism and authoritarian politics. He works as a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, where he focuses on digital transnational repression. Previously he was a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) research group of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Senior Information Controls Fellow with the Open Technology Fund, a non-profit organisation supporting global internet freedom. From 2014 until 2018, Dr. Michaelsen was a post-doctoral researcher in the project Authoritarianism in a Global Age in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam. His work on transnational repression has been published in Democratization, Globalizations, the European Journal of International Security, and Surveillance & Society, among others. 

Kirsten Roberts Lyer is Chair of the Human Rights Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Legal Studies at Central European University in Vienna. Her research examines independent state-based human rights bodies, including national human rights institutions (NHRIs), and their role in protecting rights and strengthening accountability. She is the co-author of National Human Rights Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2021) and has published on institutional independence and human rights protection. She serves on the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) Scientific Committee (2023–2028) and is a Member of the Council of Europe Working Group on the Democratic Mission of Higher Education. Before joining CEU, she spent 15 years in human rights practice, including as Director at the Irish Human Rights Commission (Ireland's NHRI) and as a legal officer at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She regularly advises international organizations on legislation and safeguards for independent human rights bodies, and strengthening parliamentary engagement with human rights. She is currently working on human rights based responses to transnational repression, having recently published Transnational Human Rights Violations: Addressing the Evolution of Globalized Repression through National Human Rights Institutions, in the Journal of Human Rights Practice with Andrew Chubb.

Puneet Kaur is the Senior State Policy Manager at the Sikh Coalition, the nation's largest Sikh Civil Rights organization. She brings over eight years of experience in public policy and advocacy rooted in close partnership with underserved and diverse communities. In her role at the Sikh Coalition, she leads statewide efforts in California and beyond to advance civil-rights protections, hate-crime prevention, and inclusive public-education policy, while playing a central role in the Sikh Coalition’s broader work to confront transnational repression impacting Sikh and other diaspora communities. Her work has helped move California toward a first-of-its-kind framework to train law enforcement to recognize and respond to transnational repression, ensuring government systems are better equipped to protect targeted communities. Puneet’s approach to policy is grounded in coalition-building, community education, and translating lived experiences into durable, systemic change.

Rebecca Cordell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on human rights and state repression. She is particularly interested in why countries cooperate in transnational repression, measuring human rights using machine learning and text analysis, and examining public opinion and human rights. Rebecca's research is published in International Interactions, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Human Rights, and Journal of Peace Research.

Dana Moss is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on power and resistance, including the transnational repression of diaspora and refugee communities by authoritarian regimes. Her award-winning book, The Arab Spring Abroad: Diaspora Activism Against Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge, 2022) explains the emergence and impacts of anti-regime diaspora mobilization during the 2011 uprising in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Her current research focuses on how members of the military resist participating in violence during wartime. ​