Prof. Gennady M. Fedorov, director of the IKBFU’s Institute of Environmental Management, Urban Development and Spatial Planning, is one of the leading Russian specialists in economic, social, and political geography. Prof. Fedorov has published over 440 works focusing primarily on transboundary cooperation, regional studies, spatial planning, and geopolitics. He authored the research concept of geodemographic situation. Prof. Fedorov is a member of the Presidium of the Academic Council of the Russian Geographical Society and the deputy editor-in-chief of the journal The Baltic Region.Prof. Alexander G. Druzhinin is the director of the North Caucasian Research Institute for Economic and Social Studies at the Southern Federal University. He is a leading specialist in the theory and methodology of socio-economic geography, the geography of Russian culture, the geographical, economic, and socio-environmental problems of Russia’s South, and geographical urban studies. Prof. Druzhinin has published over 370 research works. He is the chair of the Association of Russian Social Geographers.Рrof. dr. hab. Tadeusz Palmowski heads the Department of Regional Development at the University of Gdańsk. His scientific interests are in Baltic Europe, maritime cross-border cooperation, spatial planning in coastal regions, maritime affairs, seaports, the Kaliningrad region, and Polish-Russian cross-border cooperation. He has published over 250 works. Prof. Palmowski is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Bulletin of Geography, Tiltai, Bridges, Brücken, and The Baltic Region. Dmitri A. Subetto heads the Department of Physical Geography and Environmental Management at the Aleksandr Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University (Saint Petersburg). His research interests are in the study of lakes and lacustrine sediments from the perspective of palaeogeography, palaeolimnology, palaeoclimatology, and geoecology. A member of the Presidium of the Academic Council of the Russian Geographical Society, Prof. Subetto has published over 500 research works. Prof. Vyacheslav A. Shuper is a leading research fellow at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Department of Economic and Social Geography of Russia at Moscow State University. He is a top specialist in theoretical geography and central place theory. Prof. Shuper developed a relativistic central place theory. He has published over 200 research works in Russian, English and French. Prof. Shuper’s contributions have appeared in the popular science media. He is a member of the Presidium of the Academic Council of the Russian Geographical Society
