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.
Gesine Weber is a fellow on GMF’s Geostrategy team, where she works on European security and defense issues. Based in Paris, she focuses on EU defense initiatives, security and defense policy of the E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and Europe's role in the global order.
During a 2024 fellowship at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, Weber led a research project on European balancing in the Indo-Pacific in the context of US-China competition.
Prior to joining GMF, she worked as a defense policy adviser at the German parliament and as a consultant for the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Shanghai. Weber is pursuing a PhD in defense studies at King’s College London, where she is part of the European Foreign Policy Research Group and contributes to the work of the Centre for Grand Strategy. She is an associate researcher for the European Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for International Security.
Weber holds a master’s degree in European affairs from Sciences Po in Paris and another master’s degree in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Mandarin at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her writing and commentary appears regularly in English, French, and German in European and other international media, including the BBC, the Neue Züercher Zeitung, Politico, and France 24.
Özgür Ünlühisarcıklı is the managing director of GMF South and the regional director for Türkiye. Prior to joining GMF, he was the manager of the Resource Development Department of the Educational Volunteers Foundation of Turkey. Previously, Ünlühisarcıklı served as director of the ARI Movement, a Turkish NGO promoting participatory democracy, and as a consultant at AB Consulting and Investment Services.
Ünlühisarcıklı is an expert on transatlantic relations and Turkish foreign policy, domestic politics, democratization, and civil society. He is quoted frequently in international media including The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Deutsche Welle, and the BBC.
After graduating from the Robert College (Istanbul), Ünlühisarcıklı received his bachelor's degree in business administration from Marmara University and his master's degree from Koç University. He speaks fluent English in addition to his native Turkish.
Alina Inayeh is currently a non-resident fellow. She joined GMF in 2007 as the director of the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, a project dedicated to strengthening cooperation and fostering development in the Black Sea region. She is an active practitioner in the field of international development and democratization, having run the Freedom House office in Ukraine in 2004 and the NDI office in Russia in 2000-2003, with a focus on civic education and political processes. She has trained NGOs throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on issues related to NGO development and democratization. She was a leading civic activist in the 1990s in Romania and an active promoter of the NGO sector in the country.
Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer is GMF’s president. In her previous capacity as senior vice president for geostrategy, she led GMF’s geostrategy policy and risk advisory initiatives across Europe, the United States, and the Indo-Pacific. Her areas of expertise encompass European affairs, transatlantic and international relations, and corporate diplomacy.
With more than 15 years’ experience in senior advisory and executive roles, de Hoop Scheffer advises governments, multinational corporations, and financial institutions on the political, geopolitical, and macroeconomic trends that shape their operations and strategies. She helps them develop early-warning systems and forward-looking decision-making processes.
De Hoop Scheffer serves as an independent board director on the Supervisory Board of Meridiam and the French Treasury Strategic Committee, among other bodies. She is also chair of the advisory board of the French Chief of Defense Staff and a member of the board of the France-Nederland Cultuurfonds, the advisory board of the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, and the editorial board of The Washington Quarterly. She is a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Prior to joining GMF in 2012 as its Paris office director and as a senior fellow, de Hoop Scheffer held key advisory positions in the French government, academia, and international organizations, including with the French foreign ministry’s policy planning staff (2009-2011), NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (2010-2013), the French Ministry of Defense (2006-2009), and UN peacekeeping operations (2006). She also served as an associate professor at Sciences Po Paris and as a research fellow at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales.
A dual French-Dutch citizen, de Hoop Scheffer holds a PhD in political science from Sciences Po Paris and is the author of “Hamlet en Irak”. She is a frequent public speaker and writer.
Emiliano Alessandri is a visiting senior fellow at GMF. He is also a senior adviser with the Agency for Peace Building and an associate fellow with the Middle East Institute. His expertise is in the field of international security and multilateral cooperation with a particular focus on transatlantic relations, European affairs, and the Mediterranean/Middle East North Africa.
Alessandri was a resident senior transatlantic fellow with GMF between 2010 and 2013, working primarily on Mediterranean affairs and Türkiye. He subsequently served three successive secretary generals of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as a senior officer between 2013 and 2023. He also held positions with the International Center for Migration Policy Development, the Brookings Institution, and the Institute of International Affairs of Rome, and taught at the College of Europe and Central European University.
Alessandri holds a PhD in international history from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree in international economics and US foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Kristine Berzina is the Washington, DC-based senior fellow, US defense and transatlantic security. She is responsible for leading programming on US, Nordic, Baltic, and Arctic security and defense issues, and provides analysis on NATO and US and European foreign policy.
Berzina also leads GMF’s Across America initiative, which takes European officials into the US heartland to build regional connections on security issues. She is a frequent commentator in international media, including The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, NPR, France 24, Deutsche Welle, and The New Yorker. She is a co-host of Drošinātājs (The Fuse), a Ukraine-focused podcast and Latvian radio program.
Berzina previously worked on countering autocratic influence as head of GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy’s geopolitics team and, while based in Brussels and Berlin for the organization, on transatlantic security and energy issues. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Yale University and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge.
Markus Ziener is a professor of journalism at the Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft (HMKW), University of Applied Sciences, in Berlin. He teaches political theories and economics, mass media, journalistic writing, and the history of the press. He is also the global affairs correspondent of the newspaper The Straits Times in Singapore and a regular contributor to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Deutschlandfunk/Deutschlandradio. Ziener is also a liaison lecturer at the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
Between 2006 and 2012 Markus Ziener was Washington bureau chief of Handelsblatt, Germany's business daily. Prior to that he worked as a field reporter, covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also served as Handelsblatt’s correspondent in Moscow (1994–1999) and Eastern Europe (1990–1994). From 1999 to 2001 he was foreign editor with the Financial Times Deutschland.
Originally from Darmstadt, Ziener obtained his Ph.D. in politics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, examining financial crises and reforms in Poland. He also spent time at Duke University through a GMF fellowship for foreign journalists.