Scientific Council
The people who help us read the European Union.
The Scientific Council brings together practitioners and researchers from across Europe and beyond — government, business, universities, law, finance, think tanks and the media.
They advise in a personal capacity the editorial team on what deserves attention, test our reading of it, and bring their expertise to deepen our coverage and understanding of what the EU is up to.
Asees Ahuja
Asees Ahuja is Director for EU Policy at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv), the employers’ organisation representing 60,000 Swedish companies, where she leads and contributes to policy work on the single market, trade, enlargement and competitiveness. She has worked for the Swedish government, the OECD and the European Commission across a range of policy areas, with particular expertise in environment and climate policy, financial markets, social policy and taxation.
Ben Brake
Ben Brake is the Director General of DOT Europe, the Brussels association representing leading digital companies, since the beginning of 2026. From 2022 to 2025 he was Director-General for Digital and Data Policy at the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, where he oversaw Germany’s digital strategy and its positions on the European technology files, from the AI Act to data and platform regulation. He spent the previous decade at IBM, where he headed the Berlin office and served as Director for Regulatory Affairs for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He began his career in the Bundestag and as personal adviser to the Federal Minister of Justice.
Edoardo Campanella
Edoardo Campanella is a senior economist at Unicredit, where he covers global macroeconomic trends. He is the founding editor of the Unicredit Investment Institute. Edoardo is also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, where he works on topics such as the future of capitalism and the US-China relation. He previously worked in the economic research departments of the World Trade Organisation, the World Economic Forum and the Italian Senate. He is a columnist for Project Syndicate and co-author, with Marta Dassù, of Anglo Nostalgia: The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West.
Rebecca Christie
Rebecca Christie is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and hosts Bruegel’s podcast, The Sound of Economics. She specialises in capital markets and financial stability. She covers the intersection of policy, politics and markets, particularly when it comes to the European Union and how it interacts with the world, sustainable finance, banking, taxation and public debt management. She writes the Brussels Briefing column for International Politik Quarterly. She worked as senior economist at the European Central Bank working on capital markets and retail savings issues. She was previously a journalist at Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the Financial Times.
Anne-Célia Feutrie
Anne-Célia Feutrie is Executive Director of the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po, a post she has held since 2023. She oversees the school’s programmes, which train students for careers in public policy at national, European and international level. She previously lead Sciences Po’s Paris campus (2020-2023), the largest of the institution’s seven campuses, and before that held academic management responsibilities at the undergraduate college (2017-2020).
Jérôme Filippini
Jérôme Filippini has been Director of the Institut national du service public (INSP), the school that trains France’s senior civil servants and the successor to the ENA, since January 2026. A magistrate of the Cour des comptes since 1996 and a graduate of the ENA, he was Secretary-General of the Cour des comptes from 2013, then prefect of the Lot (2017-2020), of the Eure (2020-2022), of La Réunion (2022-2024) and of the Corsica region and Corse-du-Sud (2024-2025), before returning to the Cour des comptes.
Jérémie Gallon
Jérémie Gallon is a Senior Managing Director at McLarty Associates, where he leads the firm’s Europe & Eurasia practice and heads the Brussels office. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. He began his career as an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell, worked for the World Bank in the Balkans, served as senior political adviser to the EU Ambassador to the United States (2015–2017), and was Managing Director of AmCham France. He is the author of several books, including Henry Kissinger. L’Européen (awarded the Académie française’s Prix Eugène-Colas in 2022), Georges Pompidou. L’Intemporel, and Grands diplomates, co-authored with Hubert Védrine.
Chloé Goupille
Chloé Goupille is deputy director general of the French Institute of Morocco. A French career diplomat, she previously served as Secretary-General of the AI Action Summit, the international summit on artificial intelligence hosted by France in February 2025. She was adviser to the Minister Delegate for European Affairs (2013-2015); deputy Europe adviser to the President of the Republic (2020-2023), where she helped prepare the French Presidency of the Council of the EU; and senior adviser to the French Executive Director at the IMF and the World Bank in Washington. She has been posted to the French embassies in London and Berlin.
Benjamin Haddad
Benjamin Haddad has served as France’s Minister Delegate for Europe, under the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, since September 2024, staying in post through the Barnier, Bayrou and Lecornu governments. A member of Renaissance, he was previously Member of Parliament for Paris’s 14th constituency (2022–2024), where he sat on the foreign affairs and European affairs committees and chaired the France–Ukraine parliamentary friendship group. Before entering the National Assembly he was senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center in Washington (2019–2022) and a fellow at the Hudson Institute (2014–2018). He is the author of Le Paradis perdu. L’Amérique de Trump et la fin des illusions européennes (2019).
Giedrimas Jeglinskas
Giedrimas Jeglinskas is a Distinguished Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, working on European security, NATO and defence acquisition. He previously served as NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Executive Management (2019-2022) and as Lithuania’s Deputy Defence Minister for capability development and acquisition (2017-2019). He was a member of the Lithuanian parliament, chairing its Committee on National Security and Defence (2024-2026), and was a candidate in Lithuania’s 2024 presidential election. He earlier spent seven years at Citigroup and served as an officer in the Lithuanian armed forces.
Camino Mortera-Martinez
Camino Mortera-Martinez is a non-resident associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, where she previously headed the Brussels office. From 2024 to 2025 she was a senior adviser on European affairs to Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. She is a member of the scientific council of the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid. A lawyer by training, she writes on EU politics and policies; EU in the world; migration, security and Schengen; and Spain’s European policy. Now based in Kigali, she is a regular contributor to media worldwide and has recently launched a newsletter, ’Out of Ixelles’.
Thu Nguyen
Dr Thu Nguyen is Acting Co-Director of the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School in Berlin, where she leads the think tank’s work on EU institutional reform, the rule of law, democracy and economic governance, and hosts its podcast, EU to go. She was previously Assistant Professor of EU and comparative constitutional law at Maastricht University, where she earned her PhD. In 2023 she was appointed to the Franco-German expert group on EU institutional reform and has given evidence to the Bundestag and the European Parliament.
Marina Petri
Marina Petri is Director General of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies) in Pisa, Italy. She was previously office coordinator at the Recovery and Resilience Facility Task Force within the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, where she worked on Italy’s national recovery and resilience plan — the largest of any Member State under NextGenerationEU. She is an academic fellow at Bocconi University, where, after earning her PhD in International Law and Economics, she has researched and taught public and EU law, administrative law, environmental and energy law, and is now part of the Coordinating team of the smart city observatory.
Justine Richard-Morin
Justine Richard-Morin is European Affairs Director and head of the Brussels office of Afep, the French association of large companies, which she joined in 2008. She manages Afep’s relations with the EU institutions and, with the Paris team, coordinates the association’s European positions across the files it covers, from the single market and taxation to climate, trade and corporate governance. She previously worked at the EU affairs delegation of Rhodia, now part of Solvay, in Brussels (2007-2008) and at the European legal office of the French Ministry of Defence (2006).
Ussal Şahbaz
Ussal Şahbaz is the Managing Partner of Ussal Consultancy, a strategic advisory firm in Turkey and Azerbaijan, and the Istanbul Partner for Moharram & Partners, advising tech companies on regulation and political risk. He was previously Director at General Electric’s Istanbul Innovation Center (2016–2018) and coordinated the B20 and T20 engagement groups during Turkey’s 2015 G20 presidency. He also held leadership roles at the TEPAV and EDAM think tanks, following an earlier career as a competition economist at the Turkish Competition Authority and a consultant for the World Bank. Today, he hosts the Global İşler+ media platform and writes weekly economic columns for Nasıl Bir Ekonomi.
Paweł Świeboda
Paweł Świeboda is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre and co-director of the Brussels Economic Security Forum, the EPC’s project on economic security. He is also the founder of NeuroCentury, a brain health policy hub. He previously served as Director General of the Human Brain Project and chief executive of EBRAINS, the European research infrastructure for brain science, and before that as deputy head and head of research of the European Political Strategy Centre, the European Commission’s in-house think tank. Earlier in his career he ran the EU department of Poland’s foreign ministry (2001-2006) and advised the President of Poland on European affairs (1996-2000).
Max von Thun
Max von Thun is the Director of Open Markets Institute Europe, where he is responsible for leading the organisation’s research and advocacy work across Europe. The Open Markets Institute is a think tank focused on studying the risks of concentrated economic power and promoting competitive, fair markets that strengthen prosperity and democracy. Prior to joining Open Markets Institute, Max advised UK parliamentarians on economic policy, led the research program at the Centre for Entrepreneurs, and advised businesses on EU and UK technology and competition policy.
Antoine Winckler
Antoine Winckler is a senior counsel at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, where his practice covers European and French competition law: merger control, cartel investigations, abuse of dominance and State aid. He joined the firm in 1985 and was elected partner in 1992, representing companies, financial institutions, governments and public bodies before the European Commission, the EU courts in Luxembourg, the French Competition Authority and the Paris Court of Appeal. He teaches as a visiting professor at Sciences Po and writes extensively on EU competition law.
Helen Zhang
Helen Zhang is co-founder of International Intrigue, a daily geopolitics briefing read by more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide. She is also Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Research and Technical Projects at the office of Eric Schmidt. A former Australian diplomat posted to Tel Aviv and Hong Kong, where she worked on counter-terrorism, information operations and trade, she has worked on technology policy, including at Google, on the regulation of online content. She is a Millennium Fellow of the Atlantic Council and writes on the intersection of geopolitics, technology and business.