Josh Rudolph is managing director and senior fellow of GMF’s Strategic Democracy Initiatives. He has two decades of high-level experience at the intersection of finance and national security across the US government, multilaterals, think tanks, academia, and Wall Street.

At GMF since 2019, Rudolph has launched several programming initiatives that elevate think tank research and civil society coalitions focused on emerging autocratic threats to democracy. These GMF initiatives have analyzed malign authoritarian financial interference in elections, national security threats from unregulated money launderers, international development aid to counter kleptocracy, homegrown toolkits of autocratic corruption in Turkey and Poland, Ukrainian governance reforms amid war and reconstruction, US civil-military relations in the context of democratic backsliding, and democracy promotion in the United States.

Before joining GMF, Rudolph served in a range of US government positions dealing with finance and national security, including as senior fellow on USAID’s anti-corruption task force, adviser to the US executive director at the International Monetary Fund, director of international economics at the White House National Security Council, and deputy director of the US Treasury markets room. Before beginning his public service, Rudolph worked for seven years at J.P. Morgan as an investment banker and financial markets research strategist.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Babson College and a master’s degree in public policy with a concentration in international trade and finance from the Harvard Kennedy School. 

Olena Prokopenko is a senior fellow at GMF. She formerly managed Eastern Neighborhood programs at the European Endowment for Democracy in Brussels and served as a development adviser at the Danish embassy in Kyiv. 

Prokopenko previously chaired international relations at RPR Coalition, Ukraine’s largest civil society platform, and advised Ukraine’s finance minister on donor relations. She served as a civil society expert for the UN Development Programme and the Council of Europe, and worked as a government relations manager at Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

Prokopenko is a co-founder of the Transatlantic Task Force for Ukraine and a government relations trainer at the Kyiv School of Economics. Her analysis of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Ukraine’s reform progress is regularly featured intop international media, including the BBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, TIME magazine, Newsweek, and Le Monde.

Prokopenko is a lawyer by training and an alumna of the US State Department’s Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program. She holds a master’s degree in political science from Western Illinois University.