DEKK Institute is an independent research organization that was established in early 2020 at the initiative of several young scientists, students and humanitarian workers.
The motive was an interest in exploring society, and the shared experience of most participants from conflict environments, medical projects and refugee camps in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, where they taught the hard way two important things - a well-functioning society requires the care and peaceful personal commitment of its members, and despite many justified complains about the state of our society, we are still very lucky to live in Slovakia.
Coming to these realisations we want to do our part to keep it that way.
DEKK Institute
Lermontovova 911/3,
811 05 Bratislava-Old Town
IČO: 53486234
Mail: info (at) dekk.sk
Pavol Kosnáč holds the position of Director and CSO of the institute and Principal Investigator of the World Value Survey (WVS) program in Slovakia and Czech republic, which are run by DEKK. He is the author of the Slovakia in Data program, the aim of which is to accumulate and make available a database of social scientific data to the general public and experts alike.
He studied comparative religion studies in Bratislava, Islam and philosophy of science at Oxford and completed research placements at the London School of Economics in London and Mahidol University in Bangkok. He is currently completing his PhD in Political Science at Masaryk University in Brno.
He is dedicated to the study of the possibilities of interdisciplinary research and integration of field research methods, psychological and cognitive research tools, public opinion polls and big data. His academic specialization lies in the overlaps between ideology, religion, violence and war. His experience in humanitarian and research work in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India has led him to his interest in the issues of complex systems, social cohesion and social stability.
He works as a consultant for humanitarian organizations and research institutions in the United Kingdom, Iraq and Thailand. He is a registered expert witness with the Ministry of Justice of Slovak republic for the matters of religion and a national representative for Slovakia at the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and at the World Values Survey Association (WVSA). He is a fellow of Royal Anthropological Institute in London, member of the Board of Advisors of the Inform Institute at King's College London, member of Advisory board of Forgiveness project run by Woolf Institute at University of Cambridge and a member of the Slovak Society for the Study of Religions (SSŠN) in Bratislava.
Hugo Gloss is DEKK´s Chief Operations Officer (COO), responsible for the preparation and successful implementation of DEKK´s projects and smooth performance of the administration.
He studied international relations and diplomacy at the University of Bologna at the University Roma Tre in Rome, and completed internship placements at the Embassy of the Slovak Republic at the Holy See and at the Communication and Prevention Department of the Presidium of the Police Force of the Slovak Republic. He worked at Accenture and currently coordinates humanitarian projects of the Slovak Catholic Charity in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Ukraine.
As part of his work, he often visits countries where social cohesion is severely damaged and therefore has vested interest in Slovakia not embarking on a similar path.
Dagmar Wikarská is one of the founding members of DEKK Institute. In her position as an Inspector, she oversees the organizational units and serves as a supervisory body for the organization.
Dagmar works at CERN in the Computer Security team, developing OWASP SecurityRAT (Requirement Automation Tool). In the past, she has been part of UNDP as an ICT Engineer, she worked at EATON as an Embedded Systems Engineer, and as a research assistant at Brno University of Technology.
After obtaining her Information Security bachelor's degree at BUT, she continued her studies at Technical University of Denmark. She is a former president of student organization BEST Copenhagen, and a main organizer of TEDxTechnicalUniversityOfDenmark. At the moment she is writing her master's thesis from Switzerland.
In her free time she often goes on hikes in Jura mountains, paints, and learns french.
Veronika Ciganekova is working as Operations Manager & Junior Analyst.
She studied at King’s College London, BA in philosophy where her thesis was focused on connecting philosophy and public policy in a meaningful and effective manner. Currently, she is studying Master's degree in Public Policy at Sciences Po Paris.
Her experience is primarily in the non-profit sector where she has founded and/or led several projects and organizations. Her thematic interests include youth civic participation, development of social entrepreneurship and the topic of the brain drain from Slovakia. Her most recent experience is from the Nexteria Global HUB project, which she founded and led for two years. Before that, she worked as a project manager and later as a salesperson at SuperScale.
Among her passions are topics connected to the public sector or society more generally while finding ways to have a positive and meaningful impact there.
Nikola Gajdošová is one of the founding members of the DEKK institute, working as a digital content manager.
Currently studying science of technology, interactive media and political science at NYU in Shanghai. Her research focuses on the ethics of technology and their impact on society, with a major focus on AI (Artificial Intelligence).
In the past, she worked as a marketing manager for Berlin Innovation Agency, and crafting plastics studio, or as a project manager for the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak. Currently she's working in MedTech and mentors start-ups in the area of sustainability.
In her free time she likes to focus on philosophy, innovation in education, disinformation and biohacking.
Ján Pastorek is one of the founding members of the DEKK institute.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from Comenius University in Bratislava and completed liberal arts program at the Anton Neuwirth College. During his studies, he completed a research internship at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, where he focused on the application of reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms in solving non-local games, i.e. games where entangled pairs of qubits are used to maximize the winnings of the game, for which he won the dean's award.
During his studies, he joined Comenius College, selection program, where he has been meeting with other students and discusses issues related to science and philosophy. He finished studies at St John’s College in the US, Master of Arts of Liberal Arts with a focus on Mathematics, Science, Philosophy and Theology.In parallel, he has been studying international interdisciplinary joint master’s program of Cognitive Science, MEi: CogSci at Comenius University in Bratislava.
He is dedicated to the study of philosophy, data science, artificial intelligence (especially machine learning) and quantum computing.
He teached computer science at the Gymnasium of St. Ursula in Bratislava and led seminars on art within the program of the Academy of Great Works.