Dr. Sophia Besch is GMF's Berlin-based research director and managing director for transatlantic security. Her research and advisory work is focused on European rearmament and defense-industrial policy, US-Europe relations, the EU's role in defense, and German defense policy.

Besch joined GMF from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, where she was a senior fellow working on European defense and the transatlantic relationship. Before that, she was a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) research fellow at the American-German Institute. She also taught as an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and was a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London and Berlin, where she ran the institute's work on EU defense industrial policy, NATO, and the UK-EU defense relationship.

Besch comments frequently on defense and foreign policy in print and broadcast media, and has written for The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Internationale Politik, Politico, Project Syndicate, and War on the Rocks, among others. She has given evidence to the UK House of Commons Defence Select Committee, the Bundestag's EU Committee, the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Security and Defence, and the US Helsinki Commission. She holds a PhD from King's College London and degrees from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She speaks fluent French and German.

Sabina Babaieva is a visiting fellow with GMF’s Strategic Democracy Initiatives (SDI) team. She is a senior at Yale University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in ethics, politics, and economics with a concentration in security studies. Her coursework centers on democratic resilience, security, and governance under stress. 

Babaieva brings an academic profile closely aligned with SDI’s work on Ukraine and foreign information manipulation. With initial guidance from the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions, she developed an independent open-source project geocoding Russian propaganda narratives on military positioning in Donbas and auditing them against satellite imagery and Ukrainian and international sources. As a political-military analysis research intern at the Hudson Institute, she analyzed Russian and Chinese state media and Kremlin-adjacent sources to assess China–Russia–DPRK alignment and its implications for US allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. She completed an intensive Chinese-language study program with distinction at National Taiwan University in Taipei and coursework in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University. She has coordinated expert panels on Ukrainian reform, cognitive warfare, and wartime resilience with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Prior to joining GMF, Babaieva was a researcher at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a research assistant at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where she worked on the Soviet Economic Archives Project. She held leadership positions in the European Youth Parliament of Ukraine and WiTech Ukraine, a women-in-technology organization she co-founded in Kyiv.