Dr Jacek Kucharczyk is the President of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), one of Poland’s leading think tanks.
He currently holds Vice-Chairmanship of the Civil Society Pillar of the Community of Democracies. Dr Kucharczyk was also the chair and member of Advisory Board of Scholarship Programs at Open Society Foundations and earlier served as Advisory Board member of Think Tank Fund at Open Society Institute. Since 2017 he has been board member the OKO Foundation in Warsaw. In 2009-2015 he served as board member of the National School of Public Administration in Warsaw.
He has conducted research as well as authored and edited articles, reports, policy briefs and books on European integration, Polish-German relations, democracy and populism, and migration.
Dr Kucharczyk regularly comments on current domestic and European affairs and political developments for Polish and international media.
In the 1980s Kucharczyk was active in independent student movement and clandestine publishing in Poland. After the democratic transition of 1989, he has been a co-founder and board member of several international NGOs, including Prague Civil Society Center, the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) in Brussels and Policy Association for an Open Society PASOS in Prague.
Dr Kucharczyk received PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He studied at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw, Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Kent at Canterbury (MA in philosophy) and Warsaw University (MA in English studies).