Mediterranean
Nicolò Russo Perez is head of international relations at the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo in Turin, Italy, where he oversees grant-making and operational activities for transatlantic and European studies, and Mediterranean and emerging-country affairs, including the multi-year strategic partnership agreements with The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Russo Perez is a member of IAI’s executive committee and the European Council on Foreign Relations, and he serves on the board of ITHACA (overseeing geographic and cartographic data) and on the scientific board of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome.
Russo Perez was a member of the strategic reflection group on European affairs established by the Italian presidency of the country’s Council of Ministers. He has worked at the European Commission and the International Labour Organization, and he was a senior associate fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris.
Russo Perez studied modern and contemporary history at the University Ca' Foscari in Venice, graduating summa cum laude with a thesis on Thomas Jefferson and the early phase of American foreign policy. He also studied international relations at the Free University in Berlin’s Kennedy Institute; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University Institute of European Studies in Turin. He was the recipient of an Alberto Aquarone/Italian Fulbright Commission Award.
Hermine Sam is a Brussels-based program coordinator for GMF South. Her research interests include regional integration and geopolitical competition in West Africa.
Sam has developed and hosted several podcasts, including the “EXTRA2020” series for the French embassy in Belgium and the “Thinking Across Latitudes” mini-series, which explores global trends through a southern Atlantic and Mediterranean perspective.
Sam holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in political communication from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.