Board of Advisors

Yana Buhrer Tavanie is human rights activist and social entrepreneur with long-term experience in journalism. Yana is the co-creator and director of the global initiative for social engagement, Fine Acts. She is also the co-creator of the biggest volunteering platform in Bulgaria – TimeHeroes.org and is currently a board member there. She is the director and creator of the program “Campaigns and Communications” of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee between 2009 and 2014. Since 2016, she is the Deputy Chairman of the organization. Starting in 2016, Yana is one of the three experts on the counseling committee for Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International.

Yana has over 10 years of journalism experience and has received multiple journalist rewards. Yana was a guest lecturer and coach on human rights, media ethics, communications, leading advocacy campaigns, and managing NGOs. She has authored multiple guidebooks, including Reflecting Diversity (British Council, 2007) and Reflecting on Drugs (Addicted2Life, 2010). Yana is a senior fellow at TED, a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, and a fellowship at the Royal Academy. She has a Communications and Political Science degrees from Sofia University and specializations in Harvard, Yale, and Oxford.

Peter Sarosi is Director of Rights Reporter Foundation.

He is human rights activist and drug policy expert, the founder and editor of the Drugreporter website since 2004, the author of hundreds of articles, co-author of books and director of films about harm reduction and drug policy reform. He was the Director of the Drug Policy Program at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union between 2004 and 2015.

He is experienced in working at international drug policy forums such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. He was elected to the Core Group of the EU Civil Society Forum on drugs two times. He is the co-chair of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network. He has been representing the Hungarian Harm Reduction Network at the government’s drug advisory body in Hungary since 2007.

Peter also contributed to building a network of advocacy NGOs in Europe.

Dr. Vassileva is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and a faculty member of the Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Virginia.

Prior to joining VCU in 2014, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Illinois– Chicago. Dr. Vassileva obtained her Ph.D.degree in ClinicalPsychology from Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago, where she specialized in Neuropsychology.

Her program of research focuses on personality and neurocognitive risk factors and sequelae of chronic drug use and externalizing psychopathology.

Over the past 10 years, her research has focused on investigating the role of various dimensions of impulsivity in addiction, which she explores from different levels of analysis and incorporates neurocognitive, personality, psychiatric, genetic, computational, and machine learning approaches in her studies.