Democracy

Daniel Hegedüs is a GMF senior fellow focused on Central Europe. He writes and speaks extensively on populism and democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, and the European and foreign affairs of the Visegrad countries. He is frequently quoted in outlets such as AFP, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Euractiv, EU Observer and Der Spiegel. He has studied political science, history, and European law at the Eötvös Loránd University Budapest and Humboldt University in Berlin.

Muddassar Ahmed is a visiting fellow with GMF’s Transatlantic Leadership Initiatives with a focus on advancing inclusive leadership. He is managing partner at Unitas Communications Ltd, a British strategic communications consultancy, where he has led on projects for the United Nations, Amnesty International, the NFL, the Arab League, the U.S. State Department, and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), among many others.

Olena Prokopenko was formerly Visiting Fellow at GMF.

Janina Stürner-Siovitz is a Cities Managing Migration visiting fellow at GMF and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Political Science and the Centre for Human Rights of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her research focuses on migration governance and the interaction between cities, states, and international actors. She has developed studies, organized workshops, and produced policy papers on behalf of organizations including the European Commission, and the German Federal Foreign Office, the Mediterranean City-to-City Migration Project. 
Prior to joining the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Stürner-Siovitz was a refugee officer for Stuttgart, Germany, where she conducted a qualitative study on the city’s integration strategies in cooperation with migrant and refugee organizations.
Stürner-Siovitz completed her PhD summa cum laude in political science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She holds a master’s degree in international relations and a bachelor’s degree in political sciences from Sciences Po Aix and the University of Freiburg. She is a peer reviewer for the Knowledge Platform of the UN Network on Migration and a member of the UNHCR Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network.

Christiane Heimann is a visiting fellow at GMF and a research fellow at the Research Institute for Vocational Education of the Forschungsinstitut Betriebliche Bildung. In 2016–17, she was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been published in international academic journals, book series, and for the European Commission, and political foundations. She completed her doctoral studies in 2016 at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences, where she was the recipient of a Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation scholarship. In the course of her doctoral studies, she arranged research stays at University College London and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Prior to her graduate studies, Heimann held the position of lecturer at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern and visiting lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She received a bachelor’s degree in European studies and social sciences at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg and the Universidad de Salamanca.