The mentors

Journalism Science Alliance grantees will be offered support as a part of the training and mentoring element of the programme. The Journalism Science Alliance mentors are experienced journalists and scientists who will provide guidance, motivation, advice, feedback, support and potential networking opportunities to their mentees, serving as counsellors, advisors, and allies, depending on the specific goals of the grantees’ projects and organisational objectives.

Naiara Bellio

Naiara Bellio is journalist covering the topics of automated decision-making systems and AI accountability. She works for the Journalism team at the German non-profit AlgorithmWatch and coordinates the Algorithmic Accountability Reporting fellowship. She is also a freelance researcher and has collaborated with organisations such as AlgoRace, EuroMed Rights and Statewatch on investigating the use of algorithmic systems by administrations and their impact on vulnerable population groups, like migrants. Before, she coordinated the technology section of the Maldita.es foundation and worked for the national news agency Efe in Madrid and Argentina, as well as for the Spanish digital newspaper elDiario.es.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Pierluigi Bizzini

Pierluigi Bizzini is a freelance journalist and a member of FADA Collective. He focuses on Mediterranean issues, environment, migration and algorithmic accountability. He is among the laureates of the European Press Prize 2024.

Mentor for both the 2025 and 2026 calls

Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya

Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya is a data and investigative journalist with expertise in social, politics, human rights violations. For the past 3,5 years she specialize in investigating war crimes committed by Russian authorities and army in Ukraine, especially in forcibly transferring of children and recruiting in the Russian army. Currently she is head of data department at IStories, Russian investigative newsroom in exile.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Alfredo Casares

Alfredo Casares is a Spanish journalist, founder and director of the Instituto de Periodismo Constructivo, an organization that works along with journalists, media, universities and social entities to develop training programs, mentorship and consultancy on solutions and constructive journalism. Alfredo is Solutions Journalism Network Lede Fellow and accredited trainer. He is also Acumen Fellow for social impact. He is the author of the book “La hora del periodismo constructivo”. Alfredo is the editor of the solutions journalism section at Revista Haz. He is a teacher and a mentor in universites, and he has collaborated as a researcher and as innovation programs jury member with organizations such as Sembramedia and with the Stars4Media Programme.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Michela Chimenti

Michela Chimenti graduated with honors (110/110 cum laude) in Political Diplomacy for the Middle East, with a thesis titled “LGBTQIA+ Rights and Turkey’s Accession to the European Union.”
A freelance journalist registered with the Lombardy Order of Journalists since 2008, she began her career contributing to Il Manifesto from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. After serving for six years as Director of Video Content for the Milan-based communication agency I-Side, she became Production Manager for Magazine, the daily show of MasterChef Italy.
Following extensive travels across Asia and the Middle East to create photographic reportages on gender issues and LGBTQIA+ rights—earning accolades such as 3rd place at the PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris (2019) and a Top 10 finish at the Malta International Photography Award (2020)—she created and authored Stigma Invisibile for Discovery Plus, the first docuseries on HIV in Italy.
She is also the creator and writer of the Storytel-produced podcast Una mattina a Fiumicino, which reveals the background behind the 1973 Fiumicino airport terrorist attack, and Re:tour – A un passo da Gaza, a podcast produced by LifeGate exploring the “dark tourism” phenomenon in the Gaza Envelope. Her latest podcast, Il ciclo della discordia, addresses period poverty and menstrual justice both in Italy and worldwide.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Natalie Donback

Natalie Donback is an independent journalist based in Barcelona covering climate change, human rights, and politics. Her work has appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Grist, Rest of World, the BBC, and many other outlets. She was previously an editor and reporter at Devex, covering global health and the humanitarian sector. Her investigative work has uncovered how EU funds for fisheries benefit big industry plays instead of small-scale producers, how South European nursing homes continue to restrain the elderly despite little scientific evidence, and the ways urban inequality is fueling extreme heat in homes in Barcelona.

Mentor for both the 2025 and 2026 calls

Carmen Aguilar García

Carmen Aguilar García is an award-winning journalist, currently part of The Guardian Data Project team. Before joining the Guardian, she was the first data journalist at Sky News, working on a wide range of topics to find data stories, and covering the Covid pandemic. She also worked as a TV reporter and a multimedia journalist in Chile and Spain before jumping into the world of spreadsheets, coding and visualisations.
The stories she has published include tracking far-right politicians on TikTok, investigating climate finance, analysing companies’ annual accounts to find out who owns England’s water and to reveal the rise of private equity funds in the childcare sector. She has also taken part in several cross-border collaborations, including an exclusive investigation into what experts describe as one of the largest online scams in Europe, and an investigation into political donations across Europe. She has also written about health, universities, Airbnb accommodations in Israeli settlements, and schools among other topics.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Lola García-Ajofrín

Lola García-Ajofrín is a journalist with more than 18 years of experience. She currently works for El Confidencial, where she coordinates and produces collaborative feature stories within the Pulse consortium. She has reported from countries across the globe, including the United States, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, China, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Armenia. Her work has appeared in El País, El Mundo, EFE, La Información, CNN, Outriders, and Al Jazeera. Specializing in new storytelling formats, she led interactive and multimedia projects for nearly five years at the Polish start-up Outriders. Lola has received several international distinctions, including three nominations for the European Press Prize. She is the author of the book Gigantes de la Educación and the short documentaries 377 and An Armenian Square. She graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2006 and earned a Master’s in Broadcasting Journalism in 2007. She also trained in documentary filmmaking at LENS School and is a TTT member of the Solutions Journalism Network.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Gaëtan Gras

Gaëtan Gras is a journalism lecturer at the Institut des Hautes Études des Communications Sociales (IHECS) in Brussels, where he is responsible for courses on investigative journalism and digital investigation (OSINT, data journalism, fact-checking, and AI). He also teaches courses on OSINT and data journalism at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and at Sciences Po Toulouse. In addition to his teaching activities, he continues to work as a freelance investigative journalist (Le Vif, RTBF, Le Soir) and regularly conducts journalism training for various organisations such as the IHECS Academy, the RTBF Academy, l’Institut des auditeurs de fraude (IFA Belgium), and the Association des journalistes professionnels de Belgique (AJP). Previously, he spent more than ten years working for several media outlets (La Libre, Belga, Metro, BX1, etc.).

Mentor for the 2026 call

Ada Homolova

Ada Homolova is a freelance data journalist with over a decade of experience in data and investigative journalism, cross-border reporting, and teaching. She has worked with both small and large newsrooms across Europe, including Follow The Money, OCCRP, and Lost in Europe. She is Director of Training at the Dataharvest conference and herds frogs at datafrosch.fun.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Annick Hus

Annick Hus is a journalist and researcher specialising in animal welfare, livestock systems, biodiversity, wildlife and ecosystem health. Her work has appeared in various media outlets, including Apache, De Groene Amsterdammer, Follow the Money and Knack. In 2024, she founded the Animal Welfare Network on Signal to support journalists working on animal-related investigations. She holds an MSc in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law from the University of Winchester, and is currently completing another MSc in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health, at the University of Edinburgh. She also publishes academic work on the intersection between animal welfare science, biodiversity and policy, and collaborates on cross-border investigations.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Nicolas Kayser-Bril

Nicolas Kayser-Bril is a journalist who researches the impact of AI on society in his newsletters Gargant’IA (in French) and KI-Märchen (in German). He served as Head of Journalism for the NGO AlgorithmWatch from 2019 to 2026. Previously, he worked as a data journalist, first at the French start-up OWNI (2009-2011), then at the agency he co-founded and led, Journalism++ (2011-2017). His stories were published in Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian. He was awarded the European Press Prize in 2015. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and lives in Berlin.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Adam Levy

Adam Levy is a climate scientist with a PhD from Oxford, turned award-winning science journalist and climate YouTuber. They have worked as a video and audio journalist for a wide range of publications and audiences, in a variety of formats: from short form content, to in-depth documentaries.

Mentor for the 2025 call

YouTube

Steve Menary

Steve Menary is an investigative journalist and researcher focusing on sports integrity, governance and the impact of illegal betting. He devised and ran an EU Erasmus+ project researching match fixing in club football friendlies from 2019 to 2021 on behalf of the University of Nicosia. As a journalist, Steve is a regular contributor to Josimar and Play the Game and has worked as a journalist on a number of grant-funded investigations into data, illegal betting and match fixing in sport including the Devil in the Data, which won the IJ4EU impact award for investigative journalism in 2023. Steve is a CIES Research scholar, has written six books on sports including Outcasts, which was shortlisted for the UK football book of the year award in 2008.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Martina Merten

Martina’s work focusses on analyses of healthcare systems in LMICs, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region. She went on numerous trip to conduct research and consult around global health topics, with a strong emphasis on eradicating infectious diseases and behavior change.
She worked with organisations including the Asian Development Bank, the German Corporation for International Cooperation and Rotary International and received numerous grants for global health reporting, including fourfold of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She also works as an instructor for global health and comparative healthcare systems at various national and international universities, among other at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Based in Germany, Martina holds a Master in political science, constitutional-, social- and economic history and in public international law from Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Bonn.

Mentor for both the 2025 and 2026 calls

Raphael Minder

Raphael Minder is the Central Europe correspondent of the Financial Times, based in Warsaw. He previously covered Spain and Portugal for the New York Times. He rejoined the FT in 2022, having reported between 2000 and 2010 from Paris, Brussels, Sydney and Hong Kong as the FT’s Asia regional correspondent. He is the author of two books about Spain. He is Swiss and started in journalism with Bloomberg News in Zurich.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Jelena Prtorić

Jelena Prtorić is a freelance journalist whose work focuses on the environment, agri policies, water and human rights, through an investigative and (often) cross-border lens. She also collaborates with Arena for Journalism in Europe as programme director of the Dataharvest conference and editor for the Arena Climate Network.

Mentor for the 2025 call

Beatriz Ramalho da Silva

Beatriz Ramalho da Silva is an award-winning investigative reporter at Lighthouse Reports. Her work covers issues related to climate, pesticides, human rights abuses and technology. She has reported across Europe, Africa and South America. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País.
Prior to joining Lighthouse, she freelanced for The Guardian and Al-Jazeera. She holds an MSc in Media, Communications and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Damla Tarhan

Damla Tarhan has over six years of experience working closely with journalists and civil society organisations. She currently works as the Turkey FOI Project Coordinator at the International Press Institute (IPI), focusing on freedom of information, access to public data, and the challenges journalists and CSOs face in exercising their right to information. Her work and previous experience have given her a strong understanding of the Turkish media landscape and enabled her to build a broad network across the media and civil society sectors. Her main areas of expertise include freedom of information (FOI), gender-based violence, press and media freedom, public data, investigative journalism, and the Turkish media environment.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Luiza Vasiliu

Luiza Vasiliu is a Romanian editor and investigative journalist with a background in cultural reporting. She has over a decade of experience in leading editorial teams, coordinating impactful investigations, and advocating for human rights through storytelling. In 2026 she published a series about obstetric violence that is about to change the Patient Rights Law.

Mentor for the 2026 call

Nieves Zúñiga

Nieves Zúñiga is a freelance journalist specialised in solutions journalism and a research consultant specialised in anticorruption and land governance. She has worked for organisations including the Land Portal, the Council of Europe, the World Bank, and Transparency International, among others. She studied journalism at the University of Navarra in Spain and has an MA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Essex in the UK. In 2022, she got a Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) LEDE Fellowship to lead an international project on environmental solutions, and in 2024, she was certified as an SJN trainer. She has published in Mongabay, Foreign Policy, Revista Haz and more.

Mentor for the 2025 call