French

Sayuri Romei is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow in GMF’s Indo-Pacific program. She leads work on Japan and heads the Japan Trilateral Forum. Her research focuses on US-Japan relations and security issues in the Indo-Pacific.

Romei was previously an associate director of programs at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, where she was responsible for the Next Generation of US-Japan Nuclear Experts program and the Mansfield Forum on Energy and Climate Change, among other initiatives. She was also a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the RAND Corporation, a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center, the fellow for security and foreign affairs at Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, and a MacArthur nuclear security fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Sayuri holds bachelor’s degrees in English language and literature from the University of Sorbonne, and in international relations from the University of Roma La Sapienza, and a master’s degree in international relations and a PhD in political science from Roma Tre University. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Kyodo News, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and The Air Force Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, among other media outlets. She has appeared on BBC World News, the BBC World Service, and the PBS NewsHour to comment on security issues in East Asia. She speaks Italian, French, and Japanese, and is studying Korean.

Zorana Gajic is a program officer with GMF’s Transatlantic Trusts. She has over 30 years of experience in several international organizations, including the Open Society Foundations and the World Bank/IFC (Regulatory Reform in Serbia), as well as with numerous USAID and EU-funded projects in the Western Balkans. Her expertise spans the areas of higher education reform, regulatory reform, public administration reform, EU enlargement, and the Western Balkans. She holds a Master’s degree in political science from Central European University, and a Bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Oscar Luigi Guccione is a Warsaw-based program assistant with GMF East. He researches key policy developments in Central and Eastern European countries and organizes projects that further European and transatlantic cooperation. Before joining GMF, he worked for the European University Institute in Florence and in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe secretariat in Vienna. He was also an associate editor for Thomson Reuters in Gdansk. 

Guccione speaks fluent Italian and English, and has a good command of Polish and French.

Rita Barbosa Lobo is a program assistant for the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at GMF, where she works with the head of European operations.

In her studies, Barbosa Lobo focused on European Union law and common law, graduating from the University of Kent with a bachelor of laws and from the University of Amsterdam with a master of laws. Prior to joining ASD, she was a Schuman trainee at the European Parliamentary Research Service, External Policies Unit. Before that she was a program assistant at the European Policy Centre, Europe in the World program, and a research fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies. Her interests lie in European foreign policy.

Amandine Gnanguênon is a GMF Risk and Strategy nonresident fellow, and a senior fellow and head of the Africa Policy Research Institute’s (APRI) Geopolitics and Geoeconomics Program. She is also an associate research fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.

Before joining APRI, Gnanguênon was an independent adviser to governments, think tanks, German foundations, African regional organizations, the EU, and the UN. She also worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Security Studies in Dakar. She established and led the sub-Saharan Africa program at the Institute of Strategic Research at the École Militaire in Paris.

Gnanguênon’s research and analysis has been published on academic, policy, and media platforms. Her areas of focus include regional integration, peace and security, governance, digitalization, climate-related issues, and EU-Africa cooperation.