Robin Shepherd
Director of International Affairs, Henry Jackson Society, Bratislava

Robin Shepherd, Director of International Affairs, has held senior fellowships at some of the world's most prestigious public policy institutes. Shepherd entered the think tank world in 2003 with a public policy fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Institute for Scholars in Washington D.C. where he focused his attention on the dual expansions of NATO and the EU and their impact on transatlantic relations. Subsequently he became an adjunct fellow of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. In 2006 he was appointed as a senior transatlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), also based in Central Europe.

Amb. (Ret.) Kurt Volker
Managing Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.

Kurt Volker is a Senior Advisor to the International Security Program and member of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group.  He is a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO.  Ambassador Volker is also Senior Fellow and Managing Director of the Center on Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to joining SAIS, Ambassador Volker was a career member of the United States Senior Foreign Service, with over 23 years of experience working on European political and security issues under five U.S. Administrations. He served as Ambassador and the 19th U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from July 2, 2008 until May 17, 2009, leading the 156-person strong U.S. Mission to NATO. At NATO, Ambassador Volker straddled the transition covering the Bush and Obama Administrations, and oversaw U.S. preparations for NATO’s 60th Anniversary Summit, which took place in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany on April 3-4, 2009.

Edward Lucas
International Editor, The Economist, London

Edward Lucas is the International Editor for The Economist. He has been covering the region for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin's downfall and Vladimir Putin's rise to power. From 1992 to 1994, he was the managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tallinn. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. The New Cold War is his first book.


Tomáš Valášek
Member of the Board, Slovak Atlantic Commission; Director of Foreign Policy and Defence, Centre for European Reform, London

Mr. Valášek is the Director of Foreign Policy & Defence at the Centre for European Reform. He is also a senior advisor to the Brussels Office of the World Security Institute. Previously, he served as the Policy Director and head of the Security and Defence Policy Division at the Slovak Ministry of Defence. Before joining the Ministry of Defence, Tomáš Valášek founded and directed the Brussels Office of the World Security Institute (formerly the Center for Defence Information, CDI, an independent defence and security think-tank (2002 – 2006). Mr. Valášek is the editor and co-author of "The 'Easternization' of Europe's Security Policy" and has written numerous articles appearing in newspapers and journals including Wall Street Journal, Jane's Defence Weekly, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.