European Union

Rita Barbosa Lobo is a program assistant for the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at GMF, where she works with the head of European operations.

In her studies, Barbosa Lobo focused on European Union law and common law, graduating from the University of Kent with a bachelor of laws and from the University of Amsterdam with a master of laws. Prior to joining ASD, she was a Schuman trainee at the European Parliamentary Research Service, External Policies Unit. Before that she was a program assistant at the European Policy Centre, Europe in the World program, and a research fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies. Her interests lie in European foreign policy.

Sharinee L. Jagtiani is a senior officer for AI and democracy at GMF Tech. Her work centers on emerging technologies and their impact on democratic processes, with a particular focus on AI and digital infrastructure. Jagtiani plays a key role in GMF Tech’s work on piloting content authenticity technologies for the 2024 election cycle and examining China’s technology influence in Europe.

Previously, Jagtiani worked at the Hasso Platner Institute for Digital Engineering at the University of Potsdam, where she served as a postdoctoral fellow producing scholarship and policy recommendations on global technology governance, cloud computing, and digital public infrastructure. She has a PhD in international relations from the University of Oxford, where her thesis examined rising powers and their claims to great power status, with a focus on India.

Through her ten years of experience working in academia and think tanks, including with the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London and Berlin, Sharinee has published extensively on Asia-Pacific security, European security, and the US-China strategic rivalry.

Amandine Gnanguênon is a GMF Risk and Strategy nonresident fellow and a senior fellow and head of the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics Program at the Africa Policy Research Institute. She is also an associate research fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.

Before joining APRI, Gnanguênon was an independent adviser to governments, think tanks, German foundations, African regional organizations, the EU, and the UN. She also worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the Institute of Security Studies in Dakar. She established and led the sub-Saharan Africa program at the Institute of Strategic Research at École Militaire in Paris.

Gnanguênon’s research and analysis has been published on academic, policy, and media platforms. Her areas of focus include regional integration, peace and security, governance, digitalization, climate-related issues, and EU-Africa cooperation.