Transatlantic Relations

Alix Frangeul-Alves is a program coordinator on GMF’s Risk and Strategy team. Based in Paris, she focuses on US domestic politics and foreign policy, and the geopolitics of energy.

Frangeul-Alves holds a master’s degree from the French Institute of Geopolitics, where she specialized in security and defense, international relations, and diplomacy. She wrote master's theses on the geopolitical stakes of the energy transition in the United Kingdom and on the role of American natural gas in the transatlantic community’s geopolitical strategy. She speaks English, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

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.

Kate Stotesbery is the managing director for Government Relations at GMF, where she works closely with both policymakers and experts in Washington and across Europe to advance transatlantic cooperation through policy engagement.

Prior to joining GMF, Stotesbery served in senior roles on Capitol Hill, where she directed policy work on foreign affairs, homeland security, and immigration. Her work at the intersection of national and international policy has informed key legislative outcomes and strengthened democratic governance initiatives. She is also a commentator and writer on the politics of US foreign policy.

Her international experience includes research on governance and public trust in Malawi as well as strategic communications work with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the Albright Stonebridge Group. Stotesbery has also worked and studied in India and Spain.

A former Penn Kemble Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, Stotesbery is a Morehead-Cain Scholar and honors graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received the L. Richardson Preyer Award for Excellence in Political Science.