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Nicolò Russo Perez is head of international relations at the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo in Turin, Italy, where he oversees grant-making and operational activities for transatlantic and European studies, and Mediterranean and emerging-country affairs, including the multi-year strategic partnership agreements with The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Russo Perez is a member of IAI’s executive committee and the European Council on Foreign Relations, and he serves on the board of ITHACA (overseeing geographic and cartographic data) and on the scientific board of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome.

Russo Perez was a member of the strategic reflection group on European affairs established by the Italian presidency of the country’s Council of Ministers. He has worked at the European Commission and the International Labour Organization, and he was a senior associate fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris.

Russo Perez studied modern and contemporary history at the University Ca' Foscari in Venice, graduating summa cum laude with a thesis on Thomas Jefferson and the early phase of American foreign policy. He also studied international relations at the Free University in Berlin’s Kennedy Institute; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University Institute of European Studies in Turin. He was the recipient of an Alberto Aquarone/Italian Fulbright Commission Award.

Ambassador Romana Vlahutin is a visiting distinguished fellow for geostrategy at GMF. She served from 2019 to 2022 as ambassador at large/EU special envoy for connectivity in the European External Action Service, where she spearheaded EU connectivity strategy and worked as a chief negotiator for the EU-Japan and EU-India connectivity partnerships. Vlahutin was the EU ambassador to Albania from 2014 to 2018 and led EU support for the country’s public policy reform process, including that for the judiciary. She was the Croatian president’s foreign policy advisor from 2010 to 2014.

Vlahutin is a Croatian career diplomat, having served as head of the political section at the Croatian embassy in Washington, deputy ambassador in Belgrade, and director of strategic analysis and policy planning at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Zagreb. She also worked as an analyst for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and, in Kosovo, as a political director for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.   
 
Vlahutin is a graduate of Zagreb University and Harvard University. She is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. 
 
AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Strategic infrastructure, Connectivity, European Union, European Foreign and Security Policy, European enlargement process