Ceylan Canbilek joined The German Marshall Fund of the United States in 2005 and is currently senior program officer in the organization’s Ankara office. Prior to joining GMF, she worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, and the World Bank in Turkey. Canbilek received her bachelor’s in political science and international relations from İstanbul Boğaziçi University and holds a master’s from Essex University in political economy.
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Corinna Blutguth is a program manager in GMF's Berlin office. She coordinates programming and research on U.S.-German relations, transatlantic security, and German domestic and foreign policy. Before joining GMF, Corinna worked as a program officer for a public-private-partnership of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and the German Council on Foreign Relations. She also gained experience working for the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Transformative Power of Europe at Freie Universität Berlin. Corinna holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Potsdam and studied European Studies in Magdeburg and Brno. Next to her native German, she speaks English and Spanish and has a basic knowledge of French and Czech.
John Alexander is a former Program Coordinator at GMF.
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Sophie Arts leads GMF’s research and programming on Arctic security and geopolitics, and on North American and Nordic defense against conventional and hybrid threats. As a Washington, DC-based fellow within the Transatlantic Security program, she also works on North American continental and US homeland defense, allied cooperation in NATO and other formats, and Russian and Chinese strategic objectives and activities in the Arctic and adjacent theaters.
Arts joined GMF’s security and defense policy team in 2017. Previously, she worked at the Atlantic Council, GMF Brussels, Spiegel Online International, and Kantar Media. Her prior research covered NATO’s partnerships and flexible formats, the impact of emerging technologies on allied defense and deterrence, the dynamics of escalation within the cyber domain, and strategic stability in a multipolar world.
Her writings and commentaries are featured regularly in defense publications and international media. She is a member of The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats’ pool of experts. In 2025, she served as co-chair of the task force for global peace and security for the Think7, the official G7 group that brings together the world’s leading think tanks and research centers.
Arts holds a master’s degree from Humboldt University in Berlin and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Freiburg.
Lora Berg is a former Visiting Senior Fellow at GMF.
Melanie Whittaker is a former Head of Membership & Development, Leadership Programs at GMF.
Martin Klingst is a former visiting senior fellow.
Klingst was the news editor and a political journalist at the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR), and he also served as the domestic and foreign affairs reporter, senior political editor, head of the political department, and US correspondent at the German weekly DIE ZEIT. At the Office of the Federal President of Germany, he headed the strategic communications and speeches department.
During his career, Klingst reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and from India, China, the Middle East, and the United States. His work has taken him to domestic and foreign conflict hotspots and places wherever democracies and human rights were in danger. He chronicled some of these experiences in the books “Menschenrechte” (Human Rights) and “Trumps Amerika. Reise in ein wei�es Land” (Trump’s America. Journey to a White Country). In 2020, Klingst wrote a biography of Guido Goldman, the founder of major transatlantic institutions such as GMF. Its English edition was published in September 2021 by Berghahn Books under the title “Guido Goldman. Transatlantic Bridge Builder”.
Relations between Europe and the United States have long been at the core of Klingst’s interests. In 1971, aged sixteen, he flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a year as an exchange student in Colorado. He has since researched how, in times of growing authoritarianism and rapidly changing demographics, the intrinsic values of the transatlantic relationship—democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and civil and human rights—can be preserved.
Naja Bentzen is a policy analyst in the European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington DC.