Signe is a research fellow and a lecturer at the University of Tartu, Estonia and a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech. Her research interests include stress and burnout of journalists, working routines in the newsroom and media sociology. Her latest work focuses on self-censorship among journalists and professional communication in newsrooms between journalists and editors. She has expertise as a newspaper and radio journalist and works as a freelancer since 2015. She is a co-creator of a science podcast "Mis siis, kui..." ("What if...")

Brit works as a teacher of television journalism (University of Tartu). She also teaches storytelling and interviewing courses and is a supervisor of journalism internships. She’s a former TV journalist and editor-host for Estonian Public Broadcasting. Brit is currently working on her PhD studies, her focus is on audio-visual storytelling. Her latest work focuses on the (de)construction of news narratives when TV-journalists report on sensitive topics or unexpected events.

Katarina Damčević is a PhD student at the Department of Semiotics and a teaching assistant at the Center for Academic Writing and Communication at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She is also a research fellow in the Dangerous Speech Project that explores the roles and patterns of dangerous speech in different countries and develops responses to such speech and other forms of harmful expression. Katarina’s research focuses on hate speech, contested symbols, and nation-building narratives in the post-Yugoslav context.

Maria is a doctoral student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics in the Applied Linguistics Department at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism and Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the Estonian Tatars family language policy and Tatar language maintenance among Tatars in Estonia. She holds a BA in Asian Studies majoring in Arabistics and an MA in Linguistics and Language Editing from the Tallinn University. Maria got involved in numerous Comenius and Erasmus+ projects in Turkey. She also participated in the summer school at the Yunus Emre Institute in Ankara, Turkey. She worked shortly as The North American Programs Coordinator in the University of Tartu Library. Additionally, Maria has been once a guest during one of the programmes in radio channel "Raadio 4" and during the live morning broadcast "Кофe+" in ETV+ Estonian Television channel. She has also been working as a freelance translator from and into English, Russian, Estonian and Turkish languages for several years. Maria is passionate about the art of performing and public speaking, that goes hand in hand with academic writing and text editing.

Francesca Arnavas is a research fellow at the university of Tartu. She works within the research group on Narrative, Culture and Cognition. Her theoretical interests are Victorian literature, cognitive narratology, fairy tale and fantasy literature studies, unnatural narratology. Her first book, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” and Cognitive Narratology: Author, Reader and Characters, has been published by De Gruyter in January 2021.

Mattia holds a bachelor degree in Italian and Latin Languages and Literatures and a master's in Modern and Contemporary Literatures, both from the University of Milan, Italy. His background includes experiences in business management and web design. His previous research topics included humanistic Human-Computer Interaction and Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning. His current research at the University of Tartu focuses on complexity, interactive narratives and narratology in video games and interactive representations.

Selim is a last year PhD student at the İstanbul University, Turkey in Department of Landscape Architecture and also he was visiting doctoral researcher at Institute of Ecology & Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Estonia. He is working as a research assistant in field of landscape ecology and landscape planning in İstanbul University-Cerrahpasa where he also continues to work as a teaching. He participated in academic writing trainings supported by different institutions (Elsevier, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey etc.). He has research experiences in Greece, Sweden and Estonia

Innocent is a fourth year PhD student at the Institute of education, University of Tartu. He has good understanding of Statistical data analysis and writing scientific papers. His current research focuses on School Heads Practices, Job Stress and well-being.

Katarina is a PhD candidate at the Department of Semiotics and a teaching assistant at the Center for Academic Writing and Communication at the University of Tartu. She works as a writing retreat facilitator and the Graduate Schools’ event coordinator. Her research focuses on hate speech and contested symbols in post-conflict societies and narratives of nation-building. She actively participates in projects and collaborations in Estonia and abroad. In the context of academic writing research, her interests revolve around writing and emotional well-being, writing groups and peer-feedback, and writing retreat facilitation. As for her doctoral research, her interests revolve around topics such as language and conflict, taboo, memory politics, and futures studies.

Marzia holds a PhD in Italian studies from Durham University and is currently a Mobilitas Pluss Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu. Here, she is a member of the research group Narrative, Culture, Cognition, and her project explores literary representations of impossible body-minds with particular attention to their ethical implications. Her research interests include cognitive narratology and cognitive literary criticism, narrative ethics, and contemporary Italian and British narrative. She is in the editorial board of the Italian cultural magazine La Balena Bianca.

Pema completed her M.phil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on the topic of Tibetan diaspora in Nepal. Currently, she is a 3rd year Phd from the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore Studies, working on the cultural development and cultural narratives in the Tibetan diasporic community.

Sanni is a PhD student at the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, working on disentangling the wood-wide-web with nanoscale flashlights. In other words, she is using light emitting nanoparticles to study plant roots and the symbiotic fungi colonizing and connecting them. This is an interdisciplinary challenge including not only biology but also both organic and inorganic chemistry, as well as optical and nanophysics.

Jason is a doctoral student in semiotics and cultural studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has a strong background in public speaking, competing in competitive debate and speaking at the University of Oklahoma, placing in state and national level competitions in Impromptu Speaking and Communication Analysis. He currently teaches courses in communicating science and academic presentations throughout Estonia.

Liis works as a junior researcher and an archive specialist in the Institute of the Estonian Language. In her PhD studies, she focuses on modeling the phonetics of Estonian plosive sounds and implementing the results in Estonian text-to-speech synthesis. She administers the scientific collections of Estonian and other Finno-Ugric languages that are gathered in the language archives in IEL. Liis has also taught the introductory phonetics course in Tallinn University.

Priya is a 3rd year PhD student of medicine faculty and she works on the different aspects of Osteoarthritis pathology. Osteoarthritis is the most prevalent musculoskeletal chronic disorders without any effective cure at present. In her research, the focus is on the knee joint synovial fluid, which act as a nutrition pool for all the joint tissues and also collects the first biochemical insults in osteoarthritis. She works on different roles of this fluid in Osteoarthritis pathology, using molecular and flow-cytometry techniques. She holds master degree in Medicine and also in Biomedical Science. Her expertise are - clinical biochemistry and in vitro cell studies.

Mari-Liis is a doctoral student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics at the University of Tartu. Her main research interests include interactional sociolinguistics, youth language, and multilingualism. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the spoken language of Swedish Estonian teenagers. Before starting her PhD journey, Mari-Liis completed her BA in Swedish Language and Literature and her MA in General Linguistics. Aside from her studies, she works for a translation agency as a content writer. Mari-Liis hopes to apply the skills she's gained from the industry to her academic work.

Erik is a third year PhD student in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. His research interests include the semiotics of culture and prison ethnography, and the objective of his research is to build a bridge between these two fields. Articulating one's purpose as a researcher is oftentimes half the battle, and the Communicating Science course has proven integral in conceptualizing many of the challenges inherent to defining my own work.

Ludovica is a 3rd year PhD candidate at the Institute of Genomics. She is currently studying modern and ancient DNA to unravel past human migrations. She strongly believes that science holds the keys for a better world and, as such, its concepts and developments should be available to everyone. Communicating science properly could lead one step closer to a better world.

Anni is a third year PhD student in the medicine field, and she is working with targeting peptides to deplete tumour-associated macrophages (the bad guys) in the tumour microenvironment with the aim that eliminating those will activate immune system (bring in good guys) and therefore in combination with cancer drugs could slow down tumour growth and put a break on metastases.

Larissa holds a bachelor's degree in Chemistry. After graduating, she decided to pursue a master's degree abroad through the programme called Excellence in Analytical Chemistry (EACH). Currently, she is a first-year PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Tartu in Estonia. In a nutshell, the aim of her project is to identify amino compounds, such as amino acids, in different kinds of samples.

Daina is interested in interconnectedness of things. She is involved with contemporary art and social anthropology, hence her practice is based on polylogues and intersectionality. Her lines of inquiry are ways of being together during and after a disaster, possible alternatives to the present, caring networks and food. She’s interested in finding ways to talk about big things - such as climate disaster - in a simple way, in order to maintain the attention of and to have a dialogue with a ten-year-old. This comes in handy once she’s giving a workshop or a lecture. In her artistic practice at present, she looks into ways to convey grief and affective dimensions of climate disaster via sound or otherwise.

Wilson is a PhD candidate in Education, focusing on how to motivate teachers to use social media as an interactive learning environment. Currently, in the final laps of the programme. Having being a teacher, a school head, and ultimately, a school principal in a number of schools in Ghana, a West African country. Have been in Estonia since 2017 and still counting, and the experience is awesome!
He participated in the Communicating Science course in 2019, and later became a supporting member of Djuddah, Anni, and the team with incredible experience in literary writing and research strategies. Still part of the team. Just love the course. So, welcome!

I am a PhD student at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. My research focuses on microorganisms that inhabit seawater in areas with colder climate such as Arctic and Northern Europe. I want to know if any of those microorganisms are able to degrade oil compounds, so in case of a real life oil spill we would have environmentally friendly bioremediation method to clean it up.

Siim is a PhD student at the University of Tartu where in 2016 he also earned his master's degree in history. In the timespan between graduating and deciding to pursue a doctoral degree he worked at the Estonian Forensic Science Institute and spent a year learning web development. His current research focuses on the ancient Roman state with the emphasis being on the development and loss of the rights and freedoms of Roman citizens, and how certain understandings of freedom of speech survived in the Roman military for centuries longer than in civilian life.

Eric is PhD candidate working with virtual agents and computer supported collaborative learning activities focusing on STEAM education. He is the co-founder of MusicMath, STEAM educational project currently running in Mexico. His education background is on music production and educational technology.

Mahmoud is a junior research fellow and Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interest includes data science, machine learning, business process management, and process mining. His current project focuses on improving business processes using predictive and prescriptive models.

Marie is a 3rd year PhD student in the Marketing Team of the School of Economics and Business Administration at UT studying the consumer response to package design elements. Previously, her 15+ year career spanned from corporate marketing strategy and global competitive intelligence to creative management in both agency and corporate marketing environments. Her research and work extended to 30 countries with clients/employers ranging from Fortune’s Top 100 to new start-ups.

Maarja is a PhD student at the Institute of Education. Her PhD focus is on motivation to learn mathematics in primary school. Also she works as a Specialist of Educational Science in Centre for Educational Technology in University of Tartu.

I am a doctoral student in the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at the University of Tartu in Estonia, studying 20th century and contemporary English-language literature. Rooted in the traditions of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, narratology, and reader-response theories, my research focuses on studying narrative time through the point of view of the reader. Therefore, I am very much interested in time, fictional worlds, and the position of the reader during the act of reading.

Tauri is a doctoral student in natural geography. Last year, he spent in Bayern as a visiting student in the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Tauri's research focuses on the applicability of radar satellites (SAR) in peatland ecology. Besides the studies, Tauri participates in the labour union of the University of Tartu, being a well-versed union activist and a dedicated promoter of collective action. Throughout the previous years, unions in higher education have been campaigning for sufficient public funding of science and higher education (which translates into job security, pay stability, a decent salary, reduced stress and work-life balance).

Manuel is pursuing a PhD programme in the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting (Spanish, English and German) from the University of Granada and a master’s degree in Translating from Heriot-Watt University, in Scotland. His project focuses on intralingual translation for language learners from a gender-sensitive approach.