Carl Strikwerda is the author of “The Origins of the Contemporary Global Order: From the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War”, published by Palgrave Macmillan in London in 2025. He is the co-editor or author of four books and 30 articles, review essays, and essays in edited volumes on European and global history. His research has been supported by grants from GMF, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Strikwerda is a former president of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the College of William and Mary. He taught at William and Mary, the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Kansas.

Strikwerda has served as an historical consultant to the National WWI Museum, as a member of the executive committee of the Council for European Studies, and as a board member of WITF public radio and TV station. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan. 

Bennet Nicolaisen is a Berlin-based program assistant with GMF Risk and Strategy.

Before joining GMF, Nicolaisen worked at the European Parliament’s Directorate General for External Policies and its Transatlantic Relations and Global Governance Unit, and as a program assistant in Aspen Institute Germany’sTransatlantic Program. He also interned at the Bertelsmann Stiftung and its Sovereign Europe Program, the Hamburg offices of a member of the Bundestag, and the office of a member of the Hamburg state parliament.

Nicolaisen holds a master’s degree, with a focus on transatlantic relations, in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Fulbright scholar.

Paweł Świeboda is a Senior Visiting Fellow and Co-Director of the Brussels Economic Security Forum, the EPC’s flagship project on economic security.

In his previous role, he was Director General of the Human Brain Project and CEO of EBRAINS AISBL. In this capacity, he oversaw the building of the Research Infrastructure for the study of the brain - EBRAINS. In the earlier period, he was Deputy Head and Head of Research of the European Political Strategy Centre at the European Commission. He is a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Economic and Societal Impact of Research and Innovation. He had served on the Global Agenda Council on Europe of the World Economic Forum. He is a member of the Council of WWF Polska, an advisor to European and global companies and policy organisations.

 Paweł is also Founder of NeuroCentury, a brain health policy hub and Senior Fellow for Neurotechnology at the Center for Future Generations, and Co-Founder of the Brain Capital Alliance.

He has a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics and MA from the University of London.

Peter S. Rashish, who counts over 30 years of experience counseling corporations, think tanks, foundations, and international organizations on transatlantic trade and economic strategy, is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AGI. He also writes The Wider Atlantic blog.

Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.

Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.