Dr. Oleksandr Fisun is a professor and the head of the Political Science Department at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine (B.A. with Highest Honors in Political Economy, 1987; Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, 1990; Doctor of Political Sciences, 2009). His research primarily focuses on Ukrainian politics and post-Soviet transformations, as well as the formal and informal political institutions in comparative, regional, and global contexts.

Over the past decade, Dr. Fisun has held visiting fellowships at various academic institutions, including the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto, the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, and the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University.

Dr. Fisun's publications include the book "Democracy, Neopatrimonialism, and Global Transformations" (Kharkiv, 2006) as well as numerous chapters and articles on comparative democratization, informal politics, neopatrimonialism, and regime change in Ukraine and post-Soviet Eurasia.

Additionally, Dr. Fisun serves as the President of the "Observatory of Democracy" policy research center in Kharkiv, which he founded in 2016 with a group of political experts to enhance democratic accountability, civic activism, free and fair elections, and citizen awareness in eastern frontline Ukrainian regions.