Sydney Gdanski is a Canadian student pursuing a Master’s degree in International Humanitarian Action through the NOHA Joint Master’s Degree Programme at the University of Warsaw and Uppsala University. Prior to that, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Forensics and Behavioural Science from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Brooklyn College in New York City. Motivated by her family roots in Poland and Ukraine, she has focused her academic interests on Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. During the third year of her undergraduate studies, she was awarded the Horace W. Goldsmith Scholarship, which enabled her to complete an internship with the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, she contributed to transitional justice initiatives and projects promoting peace, open dialogue, and civic engagement in B&H and the wider Western Balkans. Also, she contributed to several PCRC publications and projects, including research on collective memory and the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide within New York City’s Balkan diaspora community. She concluded her undergraduate studies with an honours thesis titled The Russo-Ukrainian War and Implications for the Western Balkans, which she presented at several conferences in the USA. She also received an award from her home university for outstanding academic performance. Beyond her formal studies, she has participated in numerous trainings, seminars, and conferences on transitional justice, civic engagement, and humanitarian action in Poland, B&H, Montenegro, Sweden, and the USA. Her main areas of interest include transitional justice and peacebuilding, memory politics, identity, missing persons, and cultural preservation in conflict, post-conflict, and transitional societies. Motivated by these interests and their relevance to Montenegro and Western Balkans, she chose to undertake an internship with the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) as part of her ongoing academic and professional development. She is a native English speaker with basic proficiency in Ukrainian, Polish, French, and Bosnian.
