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Alina Inayeh is currently a non-resident fellow. She joined GMF in 2007 as the director of the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, a project dedicated to strengthening cooperation and fostering development in the Black Sea region. She is an active practitioner in the field of international development and democratization, having run the Freedom House office in Ukraine in 2004 and the NDI office in Russia in 2000-2003, with a focus on civic education and political processes. She has trained NGOs throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on issues related to NGO development and democratization. She was a leading civic activist in the 1990s in Romania and an active promoter of the NGO sector in the country.

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 cities, 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.

Andrew Small is a Berlin-based senior transatlantic fellow with GMF's Indo-Pacific program. He returned to GMF after a period of leave in 2023-2024 to work as the first China fellow at IDEA, the advisory hub that reports to the European Commission president. He is the author of “The Rupture”, also titled “No Limits”, about the transformation of European and American policy toward China. It was named one of the Financial Times’ 2022 Politics Books of the Year. He also wrote, in 2015, “The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics”. His articles and papers have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and many other journals, magazines, and newspapers.

Small was based in GMF’s Brussels office for five years and the Washington, DC office for ten years, and has worked as a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He has provided congressional testimony on several occasions, including to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Small was educated at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Dr. Ian Lesser is a distinguished fellow. He heads the organization’s Brussels office and leads GMF South, a program encompassing research and analysis of developments in Southern Europe, Türkiye, the Mediterranean, and North-South relations around the Atlantic. He served as GMF’s acting president from 2020 to 2021. His expertise includes US foreign and security policy, transatlantic relations, and European and Middle Eastern affairs. He holds the chair in transatlantic trade and economy at the College of Europe in Bruges. 

Prior to joining GMF, Dr. Lesser was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and vice president and director of studies at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He spent over a decade at the RAND Corporation as a senior analyst and research manager specializing in strategic studies. From 1994 to 1995, he was a member of the secretary’s policy planning staff at the US Department of State, responsible for Türkiye, Southern Europe, North Africa, and the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process.

A frequent commentator for international media, Dr. Lesser has written extensively on foreign and security policy issues. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the advisory boards of the NATO Defense College Foundation, the Antwerp-American Foundation, Atlantic Dialogues, and the Delphi Economic Forum, and has been a senior fellow of the Onassis Foundation and the Luso-American Development Foundation.