About the speakers at the Lyberg Conference

Jennifer Agiesta

JENNIFER AGIESTA is Director of Polling and Election Analytics at CNN. Named to the position in January 2015, Agiesta leads the network’s polling team, which both conducts and reports on polling, and heads its Election Night Decision Desk. During her time at CNN, she has revamped and modernized CNN’s standards for reporting on polls and surveys and changed the way network conducts its own polls to lean on cutting-edge methodologies. She works out of CNN’s Washington DC bureau.

Agiesta is a recognized leader in survey research and public opinion. She serves as President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and collaborated with other leading researchers on AAPOR’s evaluation of 2020 pre-election polling.

Prior to joining CNN, Agiesta served as director of polling at The Associated Press. There, she ran a two-person polling unit, conducting domestic and international survey research for the news cooperative and leading its election night exit poll coverage. She has also covered polling at The Washington Post and helped build the National Election Pool exit poll operation at Edison Research. Prior to her media work, Agiesta worked on messaging research with DC firms Belden, Russonello and Stewart and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Agiesta holds a bachelors degree in politics and journalism from Washington and Lee University, and is a native of Long Island, New York.

Kathleen A. Frankovic

KATHLEEN A. FRANKOVIC, Ph.D. speaks and writes internationally about public opinion research, journalism and elections as an invited speaker in places as diverse as Italy, Jordan, Hong Kong, Manila, Mexico, Tbilisi, Chile and India.

She retired from more than three decades of full-time work as Director of Surveys at CBS News in 2009, and since then has consulted for CBS News, Harvard University, the Pew Research Center, Open Society Foundations and YouGov, for which she writes weekly analyses of polling results of the Economist/YouGov Polls.

She has served as President of both AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research) and WAPOR (World Association for Public Opinion Research), and is currently a member of the Professional Standards Committee of ESOMAR, the Global Insights Community. In that role, she chaired the committee that updated the ESOMAR/WAPOR Guide on Opinion Polls and Published Surveys and was the main ESOMAR representative for the recently-released  ESOMAR/WAPOR Freedom to Publish and Conduct Opinion Polls Report.

Alison Gow

ALISON GOW has worked in journalism for more than 30 years, holding various roles including newspaper and website editor for Wales on Sunday, Wales Online and the Daily Post. She was Innovations Editor and Audience and Content Director, Audio and Video with Reach plc, specialising in the development and implementation of digital journalism, where she also led the award-winning Laudable Podcasts, an initiative for niche and local news audio. 

A former board member and President of the Society of Editors, she was recently awarded a Fellowship of the SoE for contributions to the industry.

She currently works as a media consultant and leadership coach.

Karin Schmidt Hellsing

KARIN SCHMIDT HELLSING is the Editorial Director for Aftonbladet, which is Sweden's largest daily newspaper. She has held this position since 2018.

Previously, she worked as interim product owner for the news, sports and community sites at SVT (Swedens Public Service Network). In addition to this she handled program management and was responsible for Play and several other online projects.

Before that she worked at Aftonbladet.se for over ten years, where she was involved with building up the newsroom.

Gunnar Hökmark

GUNNAR HÖKMARK is the chairman of the Swedish think tank Stockholm Free World Forum. He also writes in a number of Swedish newspapers on a regular basis and is a member of the European Leadership Network (ELN). He is active in the Swedish insurance market as chairman of the Swedish Brokers Association and the companies InsureSec and InsureEd as well as vice chair of Dina Försäkringar AB. Since August 2019 he is International Senior Adviser to Kreab Worldwide.

Gunnar Hökmark was a Member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2019. He was the leader of the Swedish delegation to the EPP and active in the Committee of Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Committee of Industry, Energy and Research. Among other things, he was elected Vice-Chairman of the EPP Group in the European Parliament in January 2007, a position he held until 2014.

Lilli Japec

Dr LILLI JAPEC has over 30 years of experience in statistics production, survey methodology and quality management. She has held various positions at Statistics Sweden such as Director of Research and Development and Quality Director. She has chaired and been member of numerous international task forces. Currently Dr Japec is the Executive Chief Editor of the Journal of Official Statistics and a member of the UNECE Blue Skies Thinking Network and the European Innovation Network.

Dr Japec has authored and co-authored a number of book chapters and research papers on survey quality topics and recently she was one of the editors of the monograph ”Big Data Meets Survey Science-A Collection of Innovative Methods” (2021) published by Wiley. In 2021 Dr Japec was one of the recipients of the AAPOR’s Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award.

Karin Nelsson

KARIN NELSSON is the Managing Partner of Demoskop AB. She has 30 years of experience from the survey research industry both as an international executive and as an entrepreneur. She specializes in public opinion and election polling and she is especially interested in the future of survey research. This includes big data, data driven research and quality management. Karin Nelsson is a member of Esomar, AAPOR, Statistikfrämjandet and Surveyföreningen. She is an experienced moderator and speaker at conferences and a frequent guest expert in media.

Demoskop is a fact based agency providing insights and recommendations to their clients based on high quality data and advanced analytics. Their expertise is in public opinion polling, election polling, branding and communication, finance, sustainability and other data-driven research. They do not take policy positions.

Demoskop was founded in 1989 and merged with Inizio in 2019. They collect data in many different ways, more and more digitally, and share their insights in the format their clients request, often in dashboards and in real time. Their clients are facing complex challenges in a world undergoing massive change.