Alberto Tagliapietra is Senior Program Coordinator at the Mediterranean Policy Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in Brussels. His research interests focus on EU policies, migration, and the intersection between technology and migration.
Alberto joined GMF in 2019. He holds a BA in international relations and an MSc in European and international studies from the University of Trento.
Gesine Weber is a fellow on GMF’s Geostrategy team. She works on European security and defense issues, and leads the annual Transatlantic Trends study. Based in Paris, she focuses on Europe’s role as a geopolitical actor, EU defense initiatives, and security and defense policy of the E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom).
Prior to joining GMF, Weber worked as a defense policy adviser in the German parliament and as a consultant for the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Shanghai. Weber is pursuing PhD research on European defense cooperation at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, where she is part of the European Foreign Policy Research Group. She contributes to the work of the Centre for Grand Strategy and is an associate researcher for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Weber holds a master’s degree in European affairs from Sciences Po in Paris and another master’s degree in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Mandarin at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is regularly published in English, French, and German on European security and defense issues, and is a frequent commentator on European and international media, including BBC, France24, and Deutsche Welle
William McIlhenny is a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He was formerly at the White House as a director at the National Security Council, and at the US Department of State as a senior policy advisor. He also served as a member of the secretary of state's policy planning staff.
Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff is the Guido Goldman Distinguished Scholar for Geostrategy, based in GMF’s Berlin office, which he led for five years. With an earlier stint at GMF in Washington, DC, he has served on the organization’s executive team for a decade.
Between 2013 and 2017, Kleine-Brockhoff served as an advisor to German President Joachim Gauck, overseeing policy planning and speechwriting. He started his career as a journalist with DIE ZEIT, Germany’s intellectual weekly, and became its Washington bureau chief.