Panelists 2026
Panel 1 – Strategic Futures of Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Inteligence
Moderator: Mato Njavro, PhD

Dr. Mato Njavro serves as the Dean of Zagreb School of Economics and Management (ZSEM) in Croatia. He also teaches at the Luxembourg School of Business and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. With a diverse academic and professional background, Dr. Njavro has worked at the St. Gallen Institute of Management in Asia, in Singapore, where he served as a senior research fellow. He was also a lecturer at the Singapore Management University, where he taught a course on China’s economic development. Prior to joining the University of St. Gallen and Singapore Management University, Dr. Njavro was a visiting research fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences (IQSS). Dr. Njavro authored and co-authored several papers and case studies published by the Harvard Business School publishing. Dr. Njavro has earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics and finance from Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He earned his PhD in finance from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. His professional experience includes working in the investment banking divisions of Lehman Brothers and Nomura in London. (source: https://zsem.hr/en/dr-sc-mato-njavro/)
Panel 2 – Ethics of AI in Education: Key Challenges and Practical Solutions
Moderator: Kristijan Krkač, PhD

Assoc. Prof. Kristijan Krkač, PhD (b. 1970) has been a tenured professor at the Zagreb School of Economics and Management (ZSEM) since 2003. Before joining ZSEM, he was an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Zagreb (1996-2017). He was a visiting professor in France 2010-2014 (Science Po Lille), in Latvia (RISEBA University) and in Italy (H-FARM College).
His research interests are mainly in the areas of business ethics, CSR and sustainability, and in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To date, he has published 17 authored and 11 edited books (textbooks, conference and symposium proceedings, journal issues and two encyclopedias as a section editor). He is the author and co-author of more than 150 original scientific, professional and review articles, book chapters and encyclopedia articles. He has published with Palgrave MacMillan, De Gruyter, Springer, Routledge, Ashgate, Emerald, Rowman & Littlefield and the Austrian Society of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His books in English include: A Custodian of Grammar, Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Morphology (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), Conversations on Ethics and Business. A Guide to Thinking about Workplace Ethics (with R. Richards, and B. Jalšenjak, Cambridge: Ethics International Press, 2023) and Alone amidst the ruins of the future – Philosophy and unsustainability of multiple simultaneous disasters (Zagreb: MATE, 2025).
Panel 3 – The Co-Scientist Era: Self-Driving Labs, Multimodal Discovery & the Postplagiarism University
Moderator: Andrej Novak, PhD

Dr. Andrej Novak is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Mathematics and Economics at the University of Vienna and a Professor at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb. He holds both a Master’s and a PhD in Applied Mathematics, as well as a medical degree from the University of Zagreb School of Medicine, where he graduated with a thesis on cellular models in neuroscience.
His research focuses on applied mathematics and computer science, with particular interests in partial differential equations, optimization theory, medical image processing, and the use of interpretable predictive analytics in managing cardiac pathologies.
Throughout his academic career, Dr. Novak has led and coordinated more than ten university courses in mathematics, quantitative methods, and computer science at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has also contributed to curriculum development for several computer science programs and has taught quantitative methods across multiple institutions.
He has been actively involved in numerous national and international projects, serving as both a researcher and a member of advisory boards. As a principal investigator, he has led scientific projects and collaborated with international companies specializing in algorithmic solutions for image processing and computationally intensive problems.
Dr. Novak is also an internationally recognized speaker, having delivered more than twenty invited lectures across Europe, the United States, Brazil, Taiwan, and Indonesia.
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