Simone Penasa is a fellow researcher in Comparative constitutional law at the University of Trento, Italy. Simone got his Ph.D. in Comparative and European Legal Studies at the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Trento (2007). He is part of the Progetto Biodiritto (Biolaw Project), within the Department of Legal Science of the University of Trento. He is currently developing the post-doc research project "Protection and promotion of linguistic minorities: Trentino as a 'laboratory' of the law of diversity", which will end at mid June, 2013. It focuses on the analysis of the effective impact of regulation, with regard to the institutional participation of minorities within both the law making and the enforcement processes and the connection between local autonomy and minority protection and promotion.

Simone carried out a research period at the Inter-University Chair in Law and the Human Genome, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain (2006), the HeLEX Centre (Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies), University of Oxford, UK (2010); Centre for Social Ethics and Policy and the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation, University of Manchester, UK (2012); Law and Society Institute, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany (2012).

He is giving lectures in in Italian and European Public Law at the Free University of Bozen and collaborates with the Public Law and Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Trento.

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Tamara completed a BA in International Relations at the University of Malta and thereafter a Masters Programme in European Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she specialized on Europeanization and minority rights in Europe. Since September 2010 she is a PHD Fellow at the Institute of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University in Denmark, where she is also teaching within the EU Studies programme. Her PHD dissertation looks at the role of Europeanization and the dynamics added by transnational human rights on present approaches to national minority groups in Europe. The key focus relates to the fusions between national and supranational politics and legislation, looking at the extent of impact generated by EU integration policies and legislation on national minority groups in EU member states. To this end, she applies the mechanisms of Europeanization and transnational forces as the main framework within which national minority groups are studied.

As such, her main research interests are located within the field of European studies, European integration, EU policy making, human rights and how these features link to national minority groups in times of Europeanization, globalization and transnationalization. At the ECMI Tamara will be working with Tove Malloy under the cluster of Citizenship and Ethics, but she will also be developing own research further.

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Agne Cepinskyte graduated from King’s College London (UK) with MA in International Peace and Security and is currently working on the research proposal for PhD studies. Simultaneously she is working as a research assistant in Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania). Prior to MA in International Peace and Security, Agne received a joint MA in International Law from Mykolas Romeris University (Lithuania) and Ghent University (Belgium).  Furthermore, she participated in various international projects and summer schools in Washington D.C. (U.S.A.), New York City (U.S.A.), Vilnius (Lithuania) and London (UK).  Agne did voluntary work for human rights and humanitarian aid NGOs in the UK and Maldives. Her research interests are Baltic-Russian relations, national minorities in inter-State relations, national minorities in the Baltic States, nationalism and diaspora politics of kin-states.

At ECMI Agne is preparing the research proposal and developing her research further under the supervision of ECMI Director Dr. Tove Malloy and ECMI Senior Researcher Dr. Alexander Osipov.

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Ian completed his BA in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a particular focus in Catalan language and cultural studies. Continuing his studies, he completed his Master’s in Political Philosophy at the Universitat de Pompeu Fabra and wrote his thesis on authority and power in the narrative of military disobedience. While studying at UPF, he was very fortunate to take a class under Will Kymlicka. In this class, Ian began to do work on the relationship between minority groups and social networks. Ian’s academic focus is on how the development of digital social networks has served to illuminate minority relationships within states as well as create and foster bonds of minority identity. Eventually he would like to study the various ways in which states and minority groups utilize social networks in order to advance particular goals as well as how these networks influence the intentions of the aforementioned groups.

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