Tero Erkkilä is professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include global governance and policy, public institutions, accountability, and collective identities. He has published extensively on government transparency, ombudsman as global institution, rankings and models in global knowledge governance, algorithmic governance and AI policy, and research strategies and methods of public administration research. In IDIS, his work contributes particularly to ideas and institutions of accountability, paradigmatic ideas and the role of experts, numerical and algorithmic governance, as well as knowledge governance and human capital.
Timo Pankakoski, DocSocSc and Title of Docent (Associate Professor) in Political Science, is currently a Collegium Researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies. After his doctorate (2013, Helsinki) he has worked several times as a University Lecturer of Political Science or European Studies and an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Helsinki. His work focuses on political theory, history of ideas, conceptual history, metaphor studies, and related matters. His work contributes particularly to the historical formation of state-theoretical ideas and conceptual shifts in accountability.
Jaakko Hillo, (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8122-9207) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. His research specializes in experimental and behavioural political science and public administration. His current work focuses on the resilience of liberal democratic norms, the integration of AI in public administration, and addressing bias in survey research.
Ville works as a Digital Policy Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in digital governance and use of digital technologies in policymaking. Ville has an interdisciplinary background in politics and communication. He has completed a PhD in Data, Networks and Society at London School of Economics, an MSc in Social Science of the Internet in University of Oxford, and an MSc in Political Science and Public Policy in University of Helsinki.
You can contact Ville via email (ville.aula@csls.ox.ac.uk).
Laura Nordström is a Postdoctoral researcher specialising in EU research and global political economy at the University of Helsinki (World Politics). Her current research focuses on big tech EU lobbying. Her previous research was on power of expertise in the Eurozone crisis and she has successfully conducted 136 high-profile interviews with EU officials and decision-makers. Laura was the editor of Poliittinen talous journal in 2023-2024. Before entering the academia, she acquired extensive work experience in politics, e.g., in the European Parliament and the Finnish Foreign Ministry and the Parliament. In IDIS, his research contributes especially to themes of Paradigmatic ideas and the role of experts in crises and conceptual shifts of accountability.
Joel Hänninen is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science. His work focuses especially on corporate social responsibility, platform and “big tech” corporations as political actors, and critical theory. Joel’s prospective dissertation engages with CSR literature and critique of political economy, utilising discourse theory as a methodological approach. In IDIS, his research contributes especially to themes of algorithmic governance and conceptual shifts in accountability.
Konstantinos is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science. Konstantinos’ research interests include public governance, political theory, new institutionalism, and democratic governance. In his dissertation, he studies the policy concept of human-centricity and AI governance. Concerning IDIS, he contributes especially to the theme of algorithmic and knowledge governance, ideas of human capital, historical formation of state-theoretical ideas, and conceptual shifts of accountability.
Johanna Metsänheimo is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science. In her dissertation, she studies Finnish labor migration policies and the dynamics between coordinative and operative levels of talent attraction. She is particularly interested in the concepts that guide migration policies, and she engages with critical policy analysis, migration studies, and political economy. In IDIS, she contributes to ideas and policy scripts of global talent competition and migration and shifting ideas in higher education.
Juho Mölsä is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science. His research focuses on the role of oversight institutions in public policy processes and epistemic communities in regulatory processes. Mölsä's dissertation project studies the impact of Ombudsman institutions on policy-making agendas in Finland and Sweden. Empirically his research contributes to the IDIS research themes of algorithmic governance and conceptual shifts in accountability.
Lise Moawad is a PhD Student in Sociology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Visiting Research Student at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences from March to June 2025. Trained in political science and humanities, she is interested in the social and political uses of social knowledge. In her thesis, she looks at the ways French, German and British parliamentarians have been debating social sciences (2012-2022), making it a political concept in its own.
In parallel, she has been employed as a Doctoral Researcher at the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in two research projects: the first one on the societal impact of research (DIVA project, 2020-2023), the second one on university alliances (MAI project, ongoing). Previously to her academic phase, she worked as a policy officer for language and education cooperation for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (French embassy in Germany).