Vladimir Stepanov and Alexandra Dmitrieva, SRDC's co-founders and researchers, are a duo of professionals who moved to Ukraine from Russia in 2016.

Alexandra received her PhD degree in Sociology at St. Petersburg State University in 2012. Alexandra's research interests are drug use, drug and health policies, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis epidemics. She has extensive experience working as a qualitative researcher and field ethnographer in different international research projects where the main topics of study were drug use and drug policy, HIV/AIDS prevention and control, social work with people who use drugs, human rights and legal justice.

During the 10 years before moving to Ukraine, Vladimir worked as an art-director at the Loft Project ETAGI in St. Petersburg (a first multi-scale space of modern art and photography in St. Petersburg). He successfully collaborated with NGOs working in the field of drug use and HIV prevention, gender equality and human rights by organizing public talks and workshops that preceded thematic photo-exhibitions. Having graduated as a sociologist from St. Petersburg State University, Vladimir entered a PhD program at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in 2017 and successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2024. His thesis focused on developing an ethically sound comprehensive approach to study marginalized groups with a special emphasis on the use of photography-based methods.

Ievgeniia-Galyna Lukash has a 7 years of practical experience in public health and research projects. Ievgeniia's focus of interest is qualitative research methods. She received her Master of Public Health degree and now is developing her research skills and working to enrich theoretical background in sociology at the PhD-program of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. The topic of her dissertation is ethnographic methods usage in the field of drug use among young people.

Kateryna Svyrydova is a researcher with 12 years experience of quantitative social and marketing research. For the last 3 years her research interest has primarily been qualitative research in the area of public health with a special focus on projects studying drug use and HIV prevention.

Alyona Mazhnaya defended her PhD-thesis in 2020 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD. It was focused on the situation with non-fatal opioid overdose in Ukraine. Alyona is a part of several international epidemiological research projects and an author of a significant number of high-cited academic articles.

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