Anna is a current STEM Master of Business Administration (MBA) student at the University of San Francisco, where she focuses on marketing and artificial intelligence (AI). She is currently involved in AI research and agent-building projects to support marketing initiatives for several big companies and startups in Silicon Valley.

Before starting her graduate studies, Anna worked in brand and product marketing for Red Bull both at their headquarters and in the US.

Outside of her studies and work, Anna enjoys staying active through running, swimming, cycling, and triathlons. Having lived in several different countries and traveled extensively across the US and internationally, she loves exploring the outdoors, reading classic literature, and learning new languages.

Otmar Böss grew up in Tyrol, Austria, and developed an early interest in how economic change, political institutions, and societies shape one another. He studied sociology, politics & economics at Zeppelin University, where he also worked as a research assistant and taught statistics, macroeconomics, and applied data analysis. His undergraduate research focused on the socioeconomic drivers of left- and right-wing populism using cross-country data and quantitative methods.

Alongside his academic work, Otmar gained practical experience across policy, consulting, and economic research, including positions at the European Parliament, EY-Parthenon, and Deutsche Bank Research. Most recently, he worked on macroeconomic and geopolitical research, including a comparative project on defence innovation ecosystems in Germany, the United States, and Israel.

He is now pursuing an MA in analytical political economy at Duke University. His interests lie at the intersection of political economy, macroeconomics, inequality, innovation, and industrial policy. He is particularly interested in questions that cannot be understood through economics or politics alone and hopes to use rigorous quantitative research to better understand the institutional forces shaping prosperity, democracy, and technological change.

Maria Förster studied law at the University of Vienna, where she was awarded several merit scholarships. During her studies, she worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Department of European, International and Comparative Law, first with Professor Matthias Lehmann and later with Professor Ursula Kriebaum. In the 2019–20 academic year, she represented the University of Vienna in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court.

After completing her law degree in April 2022, Maria began her professional career at the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs (BMEIA), where she worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser until 2023. She subsequently served as legal counsel in the Group Corporate Governance Office of Erste Group Bank AG until 2025, while also undertaking legal work for the BMEIA's Directorate for Headquarters and Host Country Affairs.

Since July 2025, Maria has been a university assistant (prae doc) at the Department of Civil Law at the University of Vienna under Professor Gabriel Kogler, where she is pursuing her doctoral research in comparative Austrian and US private law, focusing on the restitutionary unwinding of failed contracts. In the 2026–27 academic year, she is an Austrian Fulbright student at Columbia Law School, where she is pursuing an LLM with a focus on international and comparative law. Her broader interests include comparative private law, international economic law, and international dispute resolution.

Konstantin Raftl is an alum of the International Master’s in Museology and Art History Program—a joint program of the École du Louvre in Paris and the University of Heidelberg—and holds an undergraduate degree from Freie Universität Berlin. At The New School, he is interested in conducting interdisciplinary research in arts & politics. Konstantin's interests include political thought, global politics, political imagination.

Désirée is an Austrian lawyer with professional experience in anti-discrimination law, human rights, hate crime prevention, data protection, and compliance. She developed an early interest in social justice and the challenges of navigating different communities. Her international experiences include participating in Model United Nations conferences in New York and Vienna, studying abroad in France through the Erasmus program, and completing internships in India and Belgium.

Her professional experience includes working at the intersection of law, human rights, and public accountability. She provided legal counsel in discrimination and hate crime cases, drafted legal complaints, policy analyses, and expert opinions, and contributed to legislative review and government consultation processes. She also served as a data protection officer and compliance manager, developing expertise in GDPR and data protection law.

Her academic interests lie at the intersection of critical race studies, technology, and law. At UCLA School of Law, she plans to explore how technological systems can reproduce structural discrimination and racial bias, particularly in artificial intelligence, surveillance technologies, policing, and data infrastructures. She hopes to deepen her expertise in the United States and use it to contribute to policy-making and systemic change in Europe, particularly in relation to discrimination, hate crime prevention, and emerging technologies.

Ambra Schuster is an Austrian journalist, host, and speaker currently pursuing a master’s degree in engagement journalism in New York City. She studied journalism & media management at the FH Wien der WKW (a university of applied science) in Vienna. Before moving to the US, she worked as a radio, TV, and social-media journalist at the Austrian public broadcasting corporation (ORF). In 2021, Ambra became a TikTok host and social-media editor for ORF’s flagship news program, Zeit im Bild, helping build Austria’s largest news account on the platform. She has produced news and explainer videos for TikTok and Instagram for nearly four years and is an expert in vertical-video and social-media storytelling. Passionate about innovation in journalism, she focuses on new ways to engage audiences and create relevant storytelling.

Born in Tyrol, Austria, Verena Tscherner moved to Vienna shortly after graduating from high school. She studied music and movement education at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), graduating in 2014. From 2018 to 2019, she was a studio artist at studio das weisse haus and studied artistic photography at the Friedl Kubelka School, where she received her diploma in 2019. Tscherner continued her education in digital art with Ruth Schnell and UBERMORGEN at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, graduating in 2024.

During and following her studies, Verena participated in artist residencies in Austria and abroad, including a residency in Užice, Serbia, in 2021, and with the European Capital of Culture Novi Sad in 2022. She received the City of Salzburg’s Kunstlitfaßsäulen award in 2021 as well as the Neptun State Prize for Water in the waterCREATIVE category in 2023. In 2025, she returned to the University of Applied Arts Vienna as an Alumni in Residence.

In 2025, Tscherner received a Fulbright grant to continue her studies in the United States. In fall 2026, she began her MFA in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she is currently studying.

Studying at the waterfront in Hoboken, Johannes has the best view of the city, the whole Manhattan skyline across the Hudson. And he's also glad that the library has windows, so that he can see the skyline occasionally when he looks up from his spreadsheets and mathematical models. In his free time, Johannes enjoys biking through the city and exploring rural America. Besides his studies, his goal is to make it through the fall soccer season without any injuries.

Jaqueline Bemmer is a historian of the early medieval West, specialising in the legal texts of early medieval Ireland. Trained in linguistics, Celtic languages, antique and medieval history, and Roman law, she is uniquely positioned to bring Ireland into dialogue with the continental traditions, especially post-Roman Germanic and Canon law.

Her Fulbright project examines how early Irish jurists, ecclesiastical writers, and storytellers represented acts of violence and conceptualised their moral implications, using sources written in Early Irish and Latin (5th–8th centuries). It explains what 'Menschenbild' and understanding of violence and human dignity the forms of atonement (compensation, penance, or punishment) presuppose—a question that has long puzzled historians—, offering a fresh comparative perspective on early medieval moral thought. It argues that early Irish reflections on violence belong to a larger continuum of moral reasoning in early medieval Europe, though articulated in distinctly local idioms.

Ingrid Wahl (PhD, University of Vienna) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Corporate Communication Research Group within the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her research examines internal communication regarding DEI, appreciation, and remote work. She has published in Annals of the International Communication Association, Journal of Marketing Communications, Management Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Communication Management.

Paula Engelhardt was born and raised in St. Pölten, Lower Austria. She completed her master’s degree in primary education at the Catholic Private University College of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems.

For the past two years, she has worked as a German-language teaching assistant in Spain, first at a primary school in Andalusia and later at a secondary school in Palma de Mallorca. These experiences strengthened her passion for language teaching and gave her valuable insights into different educational systems and classroom environments.

Paula is very excited to study and work at Emory University as a Fulbright foreign language teaching assistant (FLTA). She looks forward to sharing her German language and Austrian culture with her students, learning from the Emory community, and gaining a deeper understanding of American culture and higher education.

Felix Maehrenbach is a master's student of journalism and new media at the University of Applied Sciences Vienna. Since August 2026, he has been the Fulbright German teaching assistant in residence at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he leads language and conversation classes as well as the unique Language House programme. Prior to this, he also studied in Denmark and Taiwan and completed internships in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Rwanda.