On May 24 and 25, GMF held the first Ron Asmus Policy Entrepreneur seminar at Schloss Elmau, an hour southwest of Munich. The gathering included a number of European and American political, policy, and academic figures who played a role in the life of Ron Asmus, GMF’s former Brussels office executive director, who died last year.

At the off-the-record seminar, the inaugural Ron Asmus Policy Entrepreneur Fellows presented their topic proposals for consideration, conversation, and critique by the gathered experts, which included Estonian President Toomas Ilves, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, and Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics. The Asmus fellows – Nora Fisher Onar, Merle Maigre, and Mark Simakovsky – were selected as promising young foreign policy professionals whose fellowship projects show a commitment to the transatlantic relationship and will challenge existing foreign policy practices — two ideas that Asmus embodied. Using the feedback they received at the seminar, along with participation in other GMF events, the fellows will continue to refine their projects before the end of the year.

Below are the projects they presented, along with their biographies:

Nora Fisher Onar, 35, United States – “Toward a New Grand Bargain? Turkey, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Transatlantic Alliance”

Nora Fisher Onar is an assistant professor of international relations at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul and a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at Oxford. Fisher Onar, has published extensively on Turkey’s evolving relationship with Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in leading academic and policy fora. She has served as a lecturer at Worcester College, Oxford, and a project manager at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV). She has a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and a DPhil. in international relations from the University of Oxford, where she was a fellow of St. Antony’s College. She also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at Bosphorus University, Istanbul.

Merle Maigre, 34, Estonia – “Transatlantic Defense Policy: Avoiding European Demilitarization”

Merle Maigre is a policy advisor in the Policy Planning Unit at NATO, a position she has held since 2010. She previously worked as a researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies in Tallinn, Estonia; as deputy head of the Euro-Atlantic Integration and Security Sector Reform program at the NATO Liaison Office in Kiev, Ukraine; and as head of the NATO bureau in the Estonian Ministry of Defence. Maigre has bachelor’s degrees from Tartu University in Tartu, Estonia, and Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont; a master’s degree in war studies from King’s College London, and has also studied at Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS-Bologna Center and the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris.

Mark Simakovsky, 31, United States – “‘Smart Enlargement’: Shaping NATO’s European Partnerships and Enlargement in a New Era”

Mark Simakovsky is the Eurasia Strategy Advisor and NATO Coordinator in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Policy in the U.S. Department of Defense. He has been the Country Director for Georgia and Moldova in the same office, a bilateral/political officer in the Office of Russian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, and a special assistant to the director of the Eurasia Policy Division of the U.S. Department of Defense, the latter two positions as a Presidential Management Fellow. Simakovsky holds a bachelor’s degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He also has been a Fulbright Scholar in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was a participant in the Manfred Wörner Seminar.