Dr. Anna Abalkina is a research fellow at Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Perugia (Italy) with a background in international economics, later shifting her research focus to corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, paper mills, and hijacked journals. In 2022, in collaboration with Retraction Watch, she created the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. She received Nature's 10 award in 2024 for her work on exposing fraud.