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Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent with The New York Times. She joined the paper in 2004 as assistant editorial-page editor before becoming a diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and White House correspondent in 2009.

In 2015, she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for her work in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic. She is also the winner of the George Polk award for health reporting (2015) and the Overseas Press Club Award (2015).

Cooper is the author of the New York Times bestseller The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (2008), a memoir of growing up in Monrovia, Liberia, as well as Madame President: The Extraordinary Story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (2017).

Matthew C. MacWilliams is the global public opinion lead of the Foundation International Communications Hub (Comms Hub), a newly established organization located in Spain and dedicated to the furtherance of civil society and democracy around the world. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Massachusetts where he was a visiting research associate and also lectured on democracy and participation in the international Civic Initiative program.

Through surveys and focus groups, he has examined the roots of democratic deconsolidation and rise of illiberal politics in the United States and countries across Eurasia and Europe . He has conducted quantitative and qualitative research exploring this question in over 25 countries including Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain,  Ukraine, and the United States.

Tobias Harris is Deputy Director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, East Asian trade and security issues, and US Asia policy.

His first book, The Iconoclast: Shinzō Abe And The New Japan, was published by Hurst in 2020. His articles have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and the Nikkei Asia, and he regularly provides commentary for print and broadcast media worldwide. 

Andrew Cohen joined the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) as its first-ever managing editor in October 2022.

His appointment followed seven years as communications director for the Pew Research Center, the Washington, DC-based “fact tank” that conducts international public opinion polling and demographic analysis. He also served for seven years as the communications director for the Bertelsmann Foundation, the North American subsidiary of the Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung. He oversaw both organizations’ interaction with the media and other external audiences.

Hermine Sam is a Brussels-based program coordinator with GMF South and Wider Europe. Her research focuses on EU-Africa relations, Africa's role in global power shifts, and the EU's strategic partnership and investment frameworks for Africa.

Working at the intersection of policy research and political communication, Sam has developed and hosted several podcasts, including "EXTRA2020" for the French embassy in Belgium and the "Thinking Across Latitudes" miniseries, which explored global trends from a southern Atlantic and Mediterranean perspective.

Sam holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in political communication from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Alex Wilson is a senior development officer based in Washington, D.C.