French

Ambassador Brent Hardt is a resident senior fellow at GMF who brings 35 years of experience leading at all levels of government. He has guided five embassies as ambassador, chargé d’affaires, and deputy chief of mission, and served as foreign policy advisor to US Central Command and US Special Operations Command, working closely with allies to meet vital security challenges. As professor and senior advisor at the US Naval War College, he taught national security strategy and policy and developed a seminar on the evolution of modern Europe.

Hardt joined the US Foreign Service in 1988, serving in Berlin, the Hague, Rome, Paris, Canada, and the Caribbean. He was an exchange diplomat with the Netherlands Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense in 1993. In Washington, he served as Team Leader for NATO Policy in the State Department’s Office of European Political and Security Affairs, where he was responsible for NATO enlargement, NATO-Ukraine, and European Security and Defense policy issues.

Over the course of his career, Hardt has received multiple Senior Performance Awards, the Director General's Award for Reporting, five Superior Honor Awards, and three Meritorious Honor Awards. He also received the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Meritorious Civilian Service Award and the US Special Operations Command Distinguished Civilian Service Award. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s in law and diplomacy and a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Dimitar Keranov is a visiting fellow with GMF’s European Resilience program. His areas of expertise are democratization and Eastern European, especially Bulgarian, politics, on which he has written articles and been quoted in the media. Prior to joining GMF, he worked at the Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin and in the private sector.

Keranov holds a PhD in political science from Varna Free University “Chernorizets Hrabar”, a Master’s degree in governance from the University of Hagen and a Bachelor’s degree in political science from the Free University of Berlin. In addition to his native Bulgarian, he speaks English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Sesotho, Czech, and Afrikaans. He is Think Tank Lab fellow and a member of the National Capital Area Political Science Association (USA).

Hermine Sam is a Brussels-based program coordinator with GMF South and Wider Europe. Her research focuses on EU-Africa relations, Africa's role in global power shifts, and the EU's strategic partnership and investment frameworks for Africa.

Working at the intersection of policy research and political communication, Sam has developed and hosted several podcasts, including "EXTRA2020" for the French embassy in Belgium and the "Thinking Across Latitudes" miniseries, which explored global trends from a southern Atlantic and Mediterranean perspective.

Sam holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in political communication from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.