Hannah Abdullah is a senior program officer and fellow in the GMF Cities program. She leads GMF Cities’ work on climate justice and sustainability, which supports transatlantic cooperation for achieving an inclusive green transition that starts locally. Abdullah regularly speaks and publishes on the role of cities in global and European climate governance, as well as in the transition toward sustainable development. She is based in GMF’s Brussels office.

Previously, Abdullah was a senior research fellow for the Global Cities Program of the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, where she led the organization’s research and other activities on urban climate action in close collaboration with the Barcelona City Council. She also has extensive experience in the areas of cultural diplomacy and transatlantic relations. From 2015 to 2017, she was a program officer with the New-York office of the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute, where she developed and managed programs on urbanization and architecture, among others.

Abdullah holds an MSc and a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BA in art history and Spanish from University College London. She was a German Academic Exchange Service post-doctoral fellow at the Chair for Cultural Sociology at Technische Universität Dresden, and has taught and lectured at the LSE, the University of Leipzig, and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She is a German-English bilingual speaker and is fluent in Spanish.