Germany

Sudha David-Wilp is GMF’s vice president of external relations and a senior fellow. She joined GMF in 2011, and as a member of the executive team she splits her time between Berlin and Washington, DC.

She leads GMF’s teams covering cities, government relations, strategic democracy initiatives, leadership programs, and strategic convening. She has extensive experience in stakeholder management with decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic and has conceptualized a variety of convening formats involving high-level speakers in DC and across GMF’s European office network.

David-Wilp is an expert on German-American relations and the transatlantic partnership. She has written for outlets such as Axios, CNN, and Foreign Affairs, and has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg News, NPR, and numerous German newspapers and broadcasters. Prior to joining GMF, she was director of international programs at the US Association of Former Members of Congress in Washington, DC, and managed outreach to Capitol Hill and US government officials for programs such as the Congressional Study Group on Germany.

She received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree from Columbia University, and is an alumna of the Robert Bosch Fellowship and the American Council on Germany’s McCloy Fellowship programs.

Jackson Janes is a resident senior fellow at GMF and president emeritus of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) in Washington, DC. He has been affiliated with AICGS since 1989. The institute was recently renamed the American-German Institute. 

Janes has been engaged in German-American affairs in numerous capacities over many years. He studied and taught at German universities in Freiburg, Giessen, and Tübingen. He was the director of the German-American Institute in Tübingen (1977-1980) and of the European office of GMF in Bonn (1980-1985). He served as director of program development at the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (1986-1988) and was chair of the German-Speaking Areas in Europe Program at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (1999-2000).

Janes is the honorary president of the International Association for the Study of German Politics and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves on the advisory boards of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee and the Zeitschrift für Aussen- und Sicherheitspolitik (ZfAS). He is a former board member of the German-American Fulbright Commission and a former member of the selection committee for the Bundeskanzler Fellowships for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Janes has lectured throughout Europe and the United States and has published extensively on issues dealing with Germany, German-American relations, and transatlantic affairs. In addition to regular commentary given to European and US news radio, he has appeared on CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, and CBC, and is a frequent commentator on German broadcast outlets.  

Janes holds a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in international relations from Claremont Graduate University. In 2005, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s highest civilian award.

Janina Stürner-Siovitz is a Cities Managing Migration visiting fellow at GMF and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Political Science and the Centre for Human Rights of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her research focuses on migration governance and the interaction between cities, states, and international actors. She has developed studies, organized workshops, and produced policy papers on behalf of organizations including the European Commission, and the German Federal Foreign Office, the Mediterranean City-to-City Migration Project. 
Prior to joining the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Stürner-Siovitz was a refugee officer for Stuttgart, Germany, where she conducted a qualitative study on the city’s integration strategies in cooperation with migrant and refugee organizations.
Stürner-Siovitz completed her PhD summa cum laude in political science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She holds a master’s degree in international relations and a bachelor’s degree in political sciences from Sciences Po Aix and the University of Freiburg. She is a peer reviewer for the Knowledge Platform of the UN Network on Migration and a member of the UNHCR Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network.