Italian

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.

Laurențiu Pleșca is a scientific researcher and PhD candidate of the Doctoral School of Political Sciences at the University of Bucharest. His main areas of expertise are Russia's geopolitics in the Black Sea, the Eastern Partnership, EU common policies (foreign and security policy, and the Eastern Neighborhood), and the internal and external policies of the ex-Soviet states. 

Pleșca has a master's degree in international relations and European studies, and a bachelor's degree in political science, from the University of Bucharest.

Nicolò Russo Perez is head of international relations at the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo in Turin, Italy, where he oversees grant-making and operational activities for transatlantic and European studies, and Mediterranean and emerging-country affairs, including the multi-year strategic partnership agreements with The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Russo Perez is a member of IAI’s executive committee and the European Council on Foreign Relations, and he serves on the board of ITHACA (overseeing geographic and cartographic data) and on the scientific board of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome.

Russo Perez was a member of the strategic reflection group on European affairs established by the Italian presidency of the country’s Council of Ministers. He has worked at the European Commission and the International Labour Organization, and he was a senior associate fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris.

Russo Perez studied modern and contemporary history at the University Ca' Foscari in Venice, graduating summa cum laude with a thesis on Thomas Jefferson and the early phase of American foreign policy. He also studied international relations at the Free University in Berlin’s Kennedy Institute; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University Institute of European Studies in Turin. He was the recipient of an Alberto Aquarone/Italian Fulbright Commission Award.

Julia Pallanch is senior program coordinator for GMF’s Indo-Pacific Program. Based in Berlin, her portfolio concerns the management of operations including the Stockholm China Forum, and Young Strategists Forum.

Prior to joining GMF, Pallanch received training as externalist (foreign policy expert) at the EU delegation in Beijing and supported the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Asia program in Berlin. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sinology from Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and is finalizing a master’s degree in modern East Asian studies at the University Duisburg-Essen, where she specializes in Chinese foreign policy and EU-China relations.

Pallanch speaks fluent Italian, English, and Slovak, and is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and German.

Maria Florea oversees the Black Sea Trust’s (BST) Enhancing the Resilience of Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership project and BST’s grantmaking portfolio for the wider Black Sea region. 

Florea has extensive experience in leadership program design, having implemented GMF’s Leadership and Democracy Initiative for Eastern Europe, which focuses on Eastern Partnership countries. Over the course of her 10 years at GMF, she has helped hone the skills of more than 200 leaders and civil society activists, supported more than 100 organizations working to improve communities in the wider Black Sea region, and organized numerous events and large-scale forums. 

Florea holds a master’s degree in European governance from the University of Bristol and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Vienna. She is also a graduate of the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program. She speaks English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to her native Romanian.

Alberto Tagliapietra is Senior Program Coordinator at the Mediterranean Policy Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in Brussels. His research interests focus on EU policies, migration, and the intersection between technology and migration.

Alberto joined GMF in 2019. He holds a BA in international relations and an MSc in European and international studies from the University of Trento.