Angela Stent is Senior Adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is also a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. She serves on the Board of Visitors of the Marine Corps University. From 2004-2006 she served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State.

Stent’s primary research focus is Russian foreign policy, with special emphasis on the triangular U.S-Europe-Russia relationship. Her publications include: From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, The Soviet Collapse and The New Europe (Princeton University Pres, 1999); The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), for which she won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon prize for the best book on the practice of American Diplomacy. Her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (Twelve Books, 2019) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.

She was a member of the senior advisory panel for NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for Admiral James Stavridis and General Philip Breedlove. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a contributing editor to Survival and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cold War Studies, Post-Soviet Studies,, Internationale Politik and Mirovaia Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnie Otnosheniie. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Russia and Central Asia. She was a Trustee of the Eurasia Foundation. Dr. Stent received her B.A. from Cambridge University, her MSc. with distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science and her M.A. and PhD. from Harvard University.

David A. Merkel is the managing director of Summit International Advisors, LLC. His expertise includes United States foreign policy, the geopolitics of energy, the Belt and Road Initiative, Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

David A. Merkel has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Director for South and Central Asian Affairs at the National Security Council in the White House, Director for European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department. He also served as international counsellor to the Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), senior professional staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and senior foreign and defense policy adviser to the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Phoenix Committee on Foreign Relations.