English

Brussels Forum Session: Tech Wars: Who Will Win the Innovation Race?

Heike Freund is the chief operating officer of Marvel Fusion. She focuses on building and scaling the company, professionalizing processes, and forming partnerships with industrials. She was previously a partner at McKinsey & Company and a core member of that company’s operational leadership team.  

Freund has more than 15 years of experience in leading global industrialization projects. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Karlsruhe. 

Philip Bednarczyk is GMF's Warsaw Office Director. He joined the organization after serving as the senior Europe adviser on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee and staff director for the House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats for then-Ranking Member Gregory Meeks. Prior to that, he was a Bosch Foundation fellow in Germany. He also worked for an American NGO in Moscow, and for the EU in Brussels and Tallinn.

A dual Polish-American citizen, Bednarczyk studied at Fordham University and received a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. 

Brussels Forum Session: Partnership Disrupted: How Can Transatlantic Cooperation Endure?

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III distinguished fellow in strategy and statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Alexander Hamilton professor of strategy and statecraft with the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and the “Global View” columnist at The Wall Street Journal. From 1997 to 2010, he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy from 2003 until his departure.  

Mead is the author of “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World”, which received the Lionel Gelber Award for best book in English on international relations in 2002, among other honors and prizes. In 2012, the Foreign Policy Research Institute awarded him its Benjamin Franklin Prize for his work in the field of American foreign policy.

Mead’s book, “God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World”, is a major study of 400 years of conflict between Anglophone powers and rivals. The Washington Post and the Economist listed it as one of the best books of the year. His most recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, is a history of the US-Israel relationship that examines the origins of American support for Israel and the relationship’s impact on past, present, and future US policy.  

Mead has contributed to a wide variety of leading American journals and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. He is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and his translation of New Testament Greek. He is a founding board member of New America and serves on the board of Aspenia, an Aspen Italy publication. 

Brussels Forum Session: Disruptions to Transatlantic Energy Security and Competitiveness 

Wally Adeyemo served as the 15th deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury and chief operating officer of the agency during the Biden administration. He led the department’s national security and economic inequality work, and implemented some of its top policy priorities.

Adeyemo oversaw the department's use of financial sanctions and the work of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He led the department's review of the effectiveness of sanctions as a national security tool and was the primary driver of the administration’s approach to considering the national security implications of foreign direct investment. He also managed Treasury’s implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the most significant effort in decades to modernize the Internal Revenue Service.

Prior to his appointment, Adeyemo served as president of the Barack Obama Foundation and, in the Obama administration, as deputy national security adviser for international economics and deputy director of the National Economic Council at the White House.

Adeyemo is a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Global Politics and Center for Global Energy Policy. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He was previously a board member of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on social, political, and economic equity issues, and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at Blackrock. 

Brussels Forum Session: The Middle East: Crisis and Opportunity at a Time of Global Disruption

Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studes (SAIS), and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He previously served as SAIS dean and as senior adviser to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.  

Nasr is the author of several books including “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History”, “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare”, “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat”, “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future”, and “Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty”. He has also written articles and commentary for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is the recipient of a Carnegie Scholar Award and fellowships from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He was selected as the Henry Alfred Kissinger resident scholar at the Library of Congress for 2024-25.

Brussels Forum Session: Trade Wars and a New American Economic Order: Implications for Europe and the World 

Tobias Meyer has been chief executive officer of DHL Group since May 2023, with additional responsibility for the Global Business Services (GBS) division. He joined the company in 2013 as executive vice president of corporate development. He also served as chief operating officer of DHL Global Forwarding. He was appointed to the board of management in 2019, assuming leadership of the Post & Parcel Germany division.

Meyer was previously a partner at McKinsey & Company Inc., primarily based in Frankfurt and Singapore. He studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Illinois. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering.

Brussels Forum Session: Oxford Style Debate: Power and Polarity—Global Order in Times of Disruption

Thorsten Benner is co-founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. His areas of interest include the interplay of the United States, Europe, and non-Western powers in the making of global (dis)order; German and European policy vis-à-vis China and the Asia-Pacific; peace and security; and data and technology politics. Prior to co-founding GPPi in 2003, he worked with the German Council on Foreign Relations, the UN Development Programme, and the Global Public Policy Project.

Benner’s commentaries have appeared in Die Zeit, The International New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Handelsblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. His publications include “The New World of UN Peace Operations: Learning to Build Peace?” and “Critical Choices. The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance”.

Benner is an adjunct faculty member at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. From 2011 to 2015, he worked with the founding team of the School of Public Policy at Central European University. He is a member of the global board of directors of More in Common.

Benner studied political science, history, and sociology at the University of Siegen, the University of York, and the University of California at Berkeley. From 2001 to 2003, he was a McCloy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he received a master’s degree in public administration. He received scholarships from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the German National Academic Foundation.

Brussels Forum Session: Trade Wars and a New American Economic Order: Implications for Europe and the World?

Tatiana Prazeres has been foreign trade secretary at Brazil’s Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services since January 2023. She held the same position between 2011 and 2013.  

With more than 20 years of experience in trade, Prazeres has worked in government, the private sector, international organizations, and academia in Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Geneva, and Beijing. She was a senior adviser to the World Trade Organization director-general between 2013-2018 and a senior fellow at the University of International Business and Economics between 2019 and 2021. She became head director of the Department of Trade and International Relations at the Federation of Industries of Sao Paulo in 2022.  

Prazeres holds a PhD in international relations, a master’s degree in law, and other degrees in law and international relations. In 2014, the World Economic Forum recognized her as a Young Global Leader.