Katya Vogt is the Global Lead for Media and Information Literacy Initiatives at IREX – an international development NGO that works with partners in more than 100 countries in four areas essential to progress: empowering youth, cultivating leaders, strengthening institutions, and extending access to quality education and information. Katya’s background includes developing approaches to fighting disinformation through awareness raising and skill building, education and teacher training, and effective initiatives to strengthen media, civil society, and local governance. While serving as Country Director of the IREX office in Ukraine from 2015 to 2018, Katya led the expansion of IREX’s program portfolio to include initiatives which improved Ukrainians’ resilience to disinformation and propaganda, built tolerance and community cohesion in conflict-affected areas of the country, and increased active citizen engagement in democratic reform processes. Today, she leads IREX’s media and information literacy - Learn to Discern (L2D) - community of practice in its learning agenda, commitment to impact and innovation, and development of effective tools for reaching diverse populations. L2D work spans over a dozen countries and includes a variety of effective models ranging from in-person and remote learning; to youth-friendly approaches, such as gamification; to infusion of skills into school and higher education curricular, and social media-based interventions. Prior to working at IREX, Katya supported teacher training and tech tools for development work at Education Development Center. She holds a Master’s in Education degree in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is fluent in Russian and Ukrainian.

Sheila Scott is senior technical advisor for gender and inclusion in IREX's Center for Applied Learning and Impact, where she brings expertise on gender and inclusion mainstreaming, women's empowerment, gender-based violence, civil society, good governance, and youth. She created and curates IREX’s Gender Focal Point Program, designs and delivers a range of training on gender equality and social inclusion topics for staff and partners, and leads collaborative gender assessments of projects across IREX's practice areas. Currently, she manages programs for gender equality and prevention of sexual and gender-based violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Since joining IREX in 2013, she has provided management and technical support to a diverse portfolio of programs in Moldova and Ukraine for media literacy, public diplomacy, library modernization, and decentralization as well as for public–private partnerships in support of technology-for-education projects in Colombia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Africa, and Tunisia. In addition, she conducted a political economy assessment of the gender digital divide in Myanmar.