Keynote Speakers

Martin Klatt is the Head of Research Cluster at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg (since 2022). Since 2005 he has been working also as the Associate Professor at the Center of Border Region Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg. His previous scientific positions were: research fellow at the Schleswig-Holstein Institute for Peace Research (1996), the Research Department of the Danish Library for South Schleswig (1997-2000), assistant professor at the Danish Institute for Border Region Studies (2001-2005). His research activities concentrate on national minorities in border regions, regional cross-border cooperation, cross-border regions in history and today, and cross-border regional governance. Martin is also coordinator of the Borders Shaping Perceptions of European Societies (B-SHAPES) Horizon Europe research project (https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/forskningsenheder/samf/b-shapes).

Martin Lačný has graduated from the Faculty of Business Management at the University of Economics in Bratislava and obtained doctoral degree in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. He is currently based at the Institute of Political Science, University of Presov, Slovakia in the position of associate professor. His research and scholarly activities are focused on border studies, development economics, international economics and business ethics. He was the principal investigator of several VEGA projects, including the project VEGA 1/0177/19, focused on research of Slovak-Ukrainian cross-border cooperation under the conditions of the gradual AA/DCFTA implementation and visa-free regime between the EU and Ukraine. He has participated in other 19 national (APVV, VEGA, KEGA) and international (ERDF, Norway Grants, IVF) research projects. Since 2016, he has been a member of the Association for Borderlands Studies.

Ekaterina Mikhailova is a Political Geographer working at the crossroads of Border Studies, Eastern European Studies and Governance. Ekaterina works as Associate Professor of Border Studies at the Centre for Geopolitics, Peace and Security, the Arctic University of Norway. She is a regional editor of the Journal of Borderlands Studies and Head of the project "Border(land) Museums as sites of remembering and forgetting: between lieux de mémoire et lieux de l’oubli" (2026-2028) funded by the French-Nordic trilateral program CUNP/FMSH. Ekaterina’s research interests include borders and borderlands, territorial identities, contested memories, indigenous communities, city diplomacy, toponymic geopolitics and more-than-human bordering.

İsmail Şiriner is Professor of Economic Policy at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Batman University, Türkiye. He holds a PhD in Economic Policy from Marmara University and was a visiting scholar in Development Studies at the University of Westminster, London. His research covers macroeconomic and development policy, labour markets and long-term unemployment, and the economics of migration and regional development, with particular attention to Türkiye's south-eastern border regions. He is the author or editor of several books in political economy and development, and co-founder of the ICOPEC International Conference of Political Economy and the CUDES congress series. He currently coordinates the preparation of a COST Action proposal on border-region economies, bringing together researchers from twelve institutions across seven countries.

Hynek Böhm holds Ph.D. in political geography. He has been professionally active in the field of cross-border co-operation (CBC) during most of his professional career in the public administration, NGOs and academia. He acted as a facilitator and a developer of cross-border initiatives. He was also a founding member of Transfrontier EuroInstitute Network (www.transfrontier.eu), which has been operating since 2010. After he defended his PhD thesis, which dealt with CBC and multi-level governance in border regions, he started researching and teaching border studies from the perspective of political geography at Technical University of Liberec (CZ) and political sciences at University of Opole (PL). He has been strongly involved in co-operation with the non-academic world, which makes his research more applied. He has co-founded EuroInstitute PL-CZ-SK, which should further deepen trilateral Polish-Czech-Slovak cross-border links by the means of training, applied research and consultancy. He has been acting as a chairman of the applied geography section of the Czech Geographical Society.

Francesco Cappellano has an extensive academic and professional background spanning the EU and North America. Since 2013, he has worked at over ten universities across both continents. As a practitioner in the field of Research & Innovation (R&I), he has led numerous applied research projects for globally renowned clients, including the European Commission. Over the years, he has demonstrated a strong ability to attract and manage external funding in North America and Europe, notably under the Horizon 2020 programme (H2020 GA ID: 823952).

In 2022, he further expanded his research portfolio by securing funding from the Polish Academic Exchange (ULAM Research Fellowship).

Currently, Francesco serves as an Assistant Professor, teaching Political and Economic Geography. He also works as a Researcher within the Working Group of Economic Geography at the University of Kiel, where he manages the INTERREG-funded CLIMATEPOL project. His ongoing research focuses on the territorial dimension of Societal Challenge-oriented innovation policy, with a specific spatial emphasis on border regions.