Rest In Peace, Katarína...

With deep sorrow, we announce that on Saturday July 11, 2026, Katarína Košťálová, the co-founder and former long-serving Executive Director of SAIA, n. o., an important figure for the development of civil society and the non-profit sector, as well as one of the pioneers of promoting international mobility and cooperation in higher education and research in Slovakia, passed away.

Katarína stood at the birth of our organisation after the regime change in the early 1990s and was in SAIA's leadership until 2019. During the 1990s, when the non-profit sector in Slovakia was still taking shape, through her dedicated and persistent work, she contributed to creating a stable foundation for newly established non-governmental organisations. Her conviction that a democratic society can flourish by bringing together the efforts of an engaged civil society, and that involving people with democratic values in public life can achieve positive outcomes for the benefit of all, served as a common thread running through all aspects of her professional – and personal – life. Thanks to her dedication, projects such as Education for Democracy helped Slovak schools and universities open up to the world. Through SAIA, foreign lecturers were able to come to Slovakia, and specialised academic literature that had been unavailable before the political transition could be distributed. Equally important was her personally driven and often difficult work aimed at improving coordination and increasing professionalism within the third sector, particularly through her contribution to information and advisory activities for non-governmental organizations. Her engagement, together with effort of other leading personalities from the third sector, later paved the way towards active participation of SAIA – along with dozens of other Slovak NGOs – in the nationwide civic campaign for free and fair elections, known as “OK '98”.

In the first decade of the new century, Katarína turned her professional attention to what appeared to be a different field: supporting research and the professional development of researchers. Yet the core values of a democratic society, in which individuals can freely and meaningfully develop their potential, never disappeared from her horizon. She personally initiated discussions at Slovak universities on the need for transparent recruitment procedures, reducing administrative barriers to employing foreign researchers, and introducing ethical standards accepted across the European Union. Thanks to her efforts, Slovak universities endorsed the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers as early as 2005, laying the groundwork for Slovak higher education institutions to apply for the prestigious HR Excellence in Research Award. She served as Slovakia's national delegate to the programme committees of the EU Framework Programmes for the Marie Curie Actions, and as a national expert in the Steering Group on Human Resources and Mobility in ERA. She was behind the establishment of the national EURAXESS network, resp. network of mobility service centers, which is part of a pan-European initiative covering over 40 countries and coordinated by the European Commission.

It is thanks to Katarína, too, that SAIA is a respected and stable non-profit organization, recognised both nationally and internationally. One of the best examples of recognition of her managerial qualities is that they were highly appreciated by other European organisations active in the internationalisation of higher education, resulting in her repeated election to the Administrative Council of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) – which, alongside SAIA, brings together organisations such as Germany's DAAD, Austria's OeAD, the Netherlands' Nuffic, Greece's IKY, Finland's EDUFI, France's Campus France, and many other leading institutions.

In Katarína, we are losing a pragmatic, precise, principled, and hardworking, yet always deeply human and sincere leader. She influenced, and in many ways raised up, many of us who now continue to develop the areas and standards she established. For all of this, she deserves our profound gratitude. May she rest in peace.

The funeral service will take place on Monday, July 20, 2026, at 13:15 at the Crematorium in Bratislava.