The 2026–2027 ICDE Fellowship Cohort
We are pleased to announce the 2026–2027 ICDE Fellows, a cohort advancing research on cooperative digital infrastructure across governance, finance, labor, food systems, and AI, representing 10 countries across 4 continents.
Democratic Governance & Institutional Design
Jeremias Meyer is a Ph.D. student at the Research Institute for Cooperation and Cooperatives at WU Vienna whose work bridges industrial engineering, sustainability research, and democratic theory. Through the ICDE Fellowship, he is conducting workshops and interviews in major Austrian cooperatives to study how technology-supported deliberation and AI-generated summaries reshape governance and member-board relationships.
Melike Kaplan is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Ph.D. Fellow at Aalborg University working at the intersection of economic sociology, anthropology, and democratic futures of work. As an ICDE Fellow, she maps Copenhagen’s cooperative ecosystem to understand why platform cooperatives struggle to emerge and identifies the structural conditions under which regenerative digital enterprises can thrive.
Malu Villela is a Lecturer in Management at the University of Essex researching democratic and community-led economic models. Her Fellowship project develops a Manifesto for Cooperative AI and the Collective Good, articulating governance principles for AI as democratic infrastructure beyond extractive platform capitalism.
Shaunette T. Ferguson is a network scientist and economist, currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Barnard College, Columbia University, studying how complex systems coordinate and break down under stress. At ICDE, she is building an AI-assisted Coordination Readiness Kit to support cooperative disaster-response infrastructure in contexts where digital systems are fragile or unreliable.
AI Policy, Legal Engineering & Infrastructure Sovereignty
Nana Mgbechikwere Nwachukwu is a Ph.D. researcher at Trinity College Dublin specializing in AI governance and what she calls “legal engineering.” As an ICDE Fellow, she maps payment infrastructures and algorithmic chokepoints in the African digital creator economy to design cooperative alternatives that reduce dependency on extractive platforms.
Dorleta Urrutia-Onate is a Ph.D. student at the University of Deusto with a background in engineering and sustainable design, focused on ethical AI and cooperative finance. Through her Fellowship, she develops financing and governance models for platform cooperatives, integrating explainable AI, impact bonds, and SDG-aligned investment frameworks.
Blockchain, Crypto & Solidarity Finance
Joshua Dávila is a Berlin-based writer, researcher, and co-founder of Bread Cooperative whose work critically examines the political economy of blockchain. As an ICDE Fellow, he studies Bread’s governance and technical architecture to analyze how crypto infrastructures can be redesigned around cooperative principles.
Phakin Nimmannorrawong is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge researching the intersection of leftist politics and blockchain communities. During his Fellowship, he conducts participant observation within Bread Cooperative to examine how solidarity-oriented crypto infrastructures are built and contested in practice.
Platform Labor & Worker Power
Kauna Malgwi is a Nigerian labor organizer and leader in the emerging African Content Moderator Union who has advocated internationally for digital workers’ rights. Her ICDE research documents the structural mental health harms of AI-driven content moderation while analyzing union and cooperative models of collective care and resistance.
Mansib Rahman is co-founder of Radish Cooperative, a multi-stakeholder delivery and logistics platform operating across North America. Through the Fellowship, he reflects on the institutional design choices that enabled Radish’s growth and explores how cooperative governance can shape AI-driven logistics systems.
Food Systems & Regenerative Infrastructure
Iryandi (Dimas) Masputra is founder of Aqsa Farm in Indonesia and a doctoral researcher focused on cooperative food systems and digital governance. As an ICDE Fellow, he examines how cooperative governance principles can be embedded in the Aqsafarmer AI system to support decentralized, community-based food sovereignty.