Anna Velikaya works at the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Foundation, Russia, and is a member of the Expert Council of Rossotrudnichestvo Federal Agency. She specialised in humanitarian cooperation at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and has co-authored Modern International Relations (2017) and Public Diplomacy of Russia and Foreign Countries (2018). Her research interests include public diplomacy, humanitarian cooperation, nation branding, track II diplomacy and U.S. politics in Central Asia.
Greg Simons is a researcher and Associate Professor at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden and a lecturer at the Department of Communication Sciences at Turiba University, Latvia. He studied at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and has authored or edited over 10 books, 16 book chapters and some 74 articles since 2002.