Pawel Popiel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Production at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication. His work focuses on the political economy and regulation of the media and digital platform sectors. His research has been published in journals like Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Journal of Digital Media & Policy, and in edited books. He also has contributed to several policy reports. He is an Affiliated Fellow at the Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an Affiliate at The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also an Opportunity Fellow at the Benton Institute, investigating the policy interventions to subsidize internet access for the poorest Americans in an effort to close the digital divide.

Hendrik Theine is a post-doctoral researcher at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and a postdoctoral fellow at the Media, Inequality & Change Center (MIC) at the University of Pennsylvania. Hendrik’s research focuses on two areas: (1) Media discourses on the climate crisis, economic inequality and transformation and (2) ownership, concentration and power dynamics in media markets and digital capitalism. In his interdisciplinary research, he draws on and combines concepts and methods from various fields such as political economy, media and communication research, discourse studies, and ecological economics.

Sydney L. Forde is a PhD Candidate studying Mass Communications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University. Her work involves the study of the critical political economy of communications, critical theory, and media policy. She is a SSHRC funded Doctoral Fellow, a Fellow at the Institute for Social Research (IfS) (The Frankfurt School) in Frankfurt Germany, and a Research Affiliate at the Media Inequality and Change (MIC) Center in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Forde will begin a post-doctoral fellowship with the MIC Center in the Annenberg School for Communication upon graduation in June, 2025.

Dr. Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. He holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (2013). An acknowledged national expert on broadband deployment, policy and planning, he is the author of the book Farm Fresh Broadband: The politics of rural connectivity (MIT Press, 2023). Based on his expertise, Dr. Ali was called to testify before the US Senate Commerce Committee in 2021 on broadband funding and policy programs. He has also briefed members of the House Democrats Task Force on Rural Broadband, the New York State Blue Ribbon Commission on Re-Imagining New York, the Federal Communications Commission, and has presented before numerous state and county governments. In addition to his over two dozen journal articles and book chapters, his writing on broadband and communication policy has been published in The New York Times, The Hill, Realtor Magazine, Law & Political Economy, Digital Beat, GovTech, Zocalo Public Square, Washington Monthly, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Conversation.