Foreign Policy

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.

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 communications, government relations, 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.