Filipa Pinho is a sociologist and holds a PhD degree in sociology awarded by Iscte-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Her research interests have focused mainly on international migration (Portuguese emigration and the return of migrants, Brazilian migration to Portugal, migration policies, refugees) youth and, lately, also housing (she collaborates with the LxHabidata project). Since the 2019/2020 academic year, she has been a visiting assistant professor at the School of Sociology and Public Policy (ESPP), and is currently a researcher at CIES, Iscte. She works as an independent researcher/consultant on a variety of projects. Some recent examples: Education & Job Market Research (2024), Aga Khan Foundation; Lisbon Municipal Plan for the Integration of Migrants 2023-2026 (2024), DDS/CML; Empreender 2020 - Return of a Prepared Generation (2017), AEP Foundation; Integration and political participation of immigrants (2015), European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA); Support and Opposition to Migration in a Comparative Perspective (2017), various projects at IPPS-Iscte and PPLL, Lda (2017). Between January 2019 and September 2021, she was a post-doctoral researcher at CES Coimbra, in the project Experiences and Expectations of Return of New Portuguese Emigrants: Reintegration and Mobilities, in which CIES also participated.She was an invited assistant researcher on the PandPAS and Below 10 projects at CIES_Iscte in 2018. Previously, she was the executive coordinator of the Emigration Observatory from its foundation in January 2009 until 2013. She was a project coordinator and researcher at the International Organisation for Migration (in 2004 and 2014).She also worked for several years in national and international market research companies, as a market researcher.

Ana Lúcia Sá, PhD in Sociology, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Policy, and a researcher at the Centre for International Studies at Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. She is deputy director of the Department of Political Science and Public Policy. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Cadernos de Estudos Africanos. She belongs to the African Politics and International Relations research group of the European Network of African Studies (AEGIS) and the African Studies Section of the Portuguese Political Science Association. She is also a member of the Board and the Visibility Working Group of Aegis, European Network of African Studies. She is an associate researcher at the Amílcar Cabral Centre for Social Studies in Guinea-Bissau. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and visiting fellow at the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University in New York. Her research focuses on authoritarian regimes in Africa, especially Angola and Equatorial Guinea, contexts on which she has published books, chapters in books and articles in journals.

Ana Mónica Fonseca is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Iscte and, since 2022, director of the Center for International Studies at Iscte. Since January 2022, she has been the Director of the Master’s in Modern and Contemporary History and, between September 2019 and September 2023, Sub-Director of the Masters in International Studies. She is an integrated researcher at the Center for International Studies at ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (CEI-IUL), having been an elected member of its Scientific Committee between 2016 and 2022. Between 2006 and 2015 she was a research assistant (2006-2011) and researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations of Universidade Nova de Lisboa (IPRI-NOVA). She completed her Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History in 2011 at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) with a thesis entitled "«The carnations need water now!» German Social Democracy and the Portuguese transition to Democracy (1974-1976)", which received the Honorable Mention of the Vitor de Sá Prize for Contemporary History 2012 and also the Honorable Mention of the Mário Soares-EDP Foundation Prize 2012. Her M.A. dissertation in History of International Relations (ISCTE-IUL), which received the Fundação Mário Soares Award in 2006, was published in 2007: A Força das Armas: The support of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Estado Novo (1958-1968) [Lisbon: MNE-ID, 2007]. Her research areas focus on transitions to democracy in Southern Europe, Portuguese-German relations during the Cold War and European social democracy, and the promotion of democracy. She has published regularly in national and international journals (Journal of European Integration History, Portuguese Journal of Social Sciences, Ler História, Relações Internacionais), and participated in several collective works.

Clara Carvalho (PhD Anthropology, ISCTE, 1999) is an Associate Professor at Iscte-IUL, department of Political Science and Public Policies. President of AEGIS (European Association of African Studies) (2015-2019) and director of the Centre of African Studies/ Centre of International Studies at ISCTE-IUL (2007-2016). As a Visiting Professor, she lectured at Brown University (US). She gave short courses at the universities of Lille (France), Rovira i Virgil (Spain), Mainz (Germany), Lomé (Togo), Libreville (Gabon), Cotonou (Benin), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), UP Maputo (Mozambique). She coordinated evaluation commissions for FCT, A3ES, Leiden University (as a member) and on development policies for Camões IP and Gulbenkian Foundation. She was PI in seven projects with competitive funding. Her main research interests are Development and African Studies, and she has published on development policies, focusing on gender, health, and education. She is the editor of the journal Cadernos de Estudos Africanos and director of the PhD program in African Studies.  

Cristina Roldão is a sociologist, invited professor at ESE-IPS and a researcher at CIES-IUL. Social inequalities at school are her main field of research, with a particular focus on the processes of exclusion and institutional racism that affect Afro-descendants in Portuguese society. These issues were addressed in her doctoral thesis and in recent research of which she was part , as "African School Pathways for Young People (PALOP) Accessing Higher Education" (2015). She was a member of the coordination section Classes, Inequalities and Public Policies at the Portuguese Association of Sociology. In addition to the academic space in stricto sensu, she has participated in the external evaluation of programs such as the Escolhas Program (2006/07) and the Educational Territories of Priority Intervention (2010/11); in prospective studies like the project "Impacts of the Reduction of the Number of Students / Class" (2017); was a member of the inicial team of the Observatory for the Pathways of Secondary School Students (2006/09); and has participated in the broad public debate on racism and ethnic-racial inequalities in Portuguese society. 

Edalina, PhD in Political Science (University of Lisbon), is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon, and Guest Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at ISCTE-IUL. Her research interests comprise democratization, popular protest, representation political institutions,with a focus on Africa. Her work has been featured in Journal of International Relations and Development,  African Affairs, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Parliamentary Affairs etc. She is a regular contributor to the blog Africaye and recently published the book Party Systems in Young Democracies: Varieties of institutionalization in Sub-Saharan Africa (Routledge, 2018) and edited the volume Popular Protest, Political Opportunities, and Change in Africa (Routledge, 2022). She is currently developing a project on parliamentary activity, party-citizen linkages and constituency service in Africa (see Project HOME). 

Pedro Seabra is an Assistant Professor at Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon and Deputy Director of the Center for International Studies (CEI-Iscte). He holds a PhD in Political Science, with a specialization in International Relations from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (ICS, ULisboa). Between April 2022 and April 2024, he worked as an Adviser in the Cabinet of the Minister of National Defence of the XXIII Constitutional Government of Portugal. Previously, he was a Researcher at the National Defence Institute (IDN), a Nuclear Security Fellow at the School of International Relations-Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), a SUSI Fellow of the US State Department and a Leibniz-DAAD Research Fellow of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). In 2022 he was selected as a Paris Young Defence Leader by the Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l'Ecole Militaire (IRSEM) and as Marshall Memorial Fellow by the German Marshall Fund of the US (GMF). In 2019 he was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of International Relations-University of Brasília, Brazil (IREL-UnB) and at Universitas Islam Indonesia (UII). Between 2013 and 2016, he was a Visiting Researcher at IREL-UnB, at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, University of Pretoria, South Africa (GovInn-UP) and at ICS, ULisboa. His main research interests focus on international relations, international security, South Atlantic geopolitics, and security capacity-building in Africa and his publications verse on such topics as well as on Brazilian and Portuguese foreign and defense policy, Africa and Lusophone countries.

Holding two PhD degrees and two Habilitation titles, Renato Pereira is Associate Dean for Internationalization and Research at Iscte Business School. Specialized in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, International Business Management, and in Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Former resident-student at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the private foundation in charge of managing the international campus of the French capital city, elected by a college representing 5,000+ voters from 150+ nationalities. He has worked for different companies of the ICT cluster, including Outsystems, one of the initial Portuguese unicorns. As Director of Inteli - Innovation Center, he has integrated the coordination structure of the Mobi.E consortium, responsible for the development of the 1st nation-wide network in the world for electric vehicle charging, and the board of directors of SGORME, the network operations management company. For thirteen consecutive years, he was member of the Supervisory Board of Taguspark, the managing company of one of the biggest and most relevant science and technology facilities in Portugal. He was Advisor to the Minister of Public Works, Transportation and Communications of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Portuguese Constitutional Governments. Currently directs the Master's in International Management of iscte Business School; previously has directed the Executive Master in Innovation Management at Iscte Executive Education and several master-level and doctoral-level subjects at both Iscte Business School and School of Sociology and Public Policy. As Associate Professor of Autonomous University of Lisbon, he directed: the PhD program in Business Economics, the Geoeconomics Seminar of the PhD program in International Relations, the MSc program in Business Management, and the BSc program in Management, as well as several subjects from all three levels. He has been the recipient of different research prizes and other distinctions related with his publications awarded by prestigious members of the scientific community. He has supervised 5 post-docs, 21 doctorates and over 200 masters. He has a long and extensive international academic experience, having taken teaching or research visiting positions in higher education institutions from Angola, Brazil, China, Czechia, East-Timor, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Macao, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan.

Rui Pena Pires is a professor at ISCTE-IUL, where he completed his BA, MC, and PhD in Sociology, and is a researcher at CIES-IUL. He has been the scientific coordinator of the Portuguese Emigration Observatory (Observatório da Emigração) since 2009. Formerly, he was the head of the Department of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Rector at ISCTE-IUL. From 2007 to 2010 he was a member of the Management Board of the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) of the European Union (EU). His research interests include sociological theory, international migration and sociology of development. He is author of several publications, including the book Migrações e Integração: Teoria e Aplicações à Sociedade Portuguesa (Migration and Integration: Theory and Applications to the Study of Portuguese Society) (Celta 2003) and Atlas da Emigração Portuguesa (Atlas of Portuguese Emigration) (Mundos Sociais, 2023).