Paul Adamson is chairman of Forum Europe and Forum Global and founder of Encompass (previously E!Sharp), an online magazine and discussion space dedicated to covering the European Union and Europe’s place in the world.

Paul is a member of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board and Rand Europe’s Council of Advisors. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute, King’s College London, a Senior Adviser at the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey. He is a patron of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.

In 2012, Paul was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) “for services to promoting understanding of the European Union” and in 2016 he was made a Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite by the French government.

Maroš Šefčovič (born in 1966) is a Slovak diplomat, who since 1 December 2019 has served as Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight. In this capacity, he leads the Commission’s work on interinstitutional relations, better policymaking, strategic foresight and the European Battery Alliance. He is also responsible for the European Union’s relations with Western non-EU countries, notably Andorra, Iceland, Monaco, Norway, Lichtenstein, San Marino and Switzerland. He also co- chairs the EU-UK Partnership Council under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the EU-UK Joint Committee for the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement.

European affairs have been at the centre of Mr Šefčovič’s career for almost two decades. In 2014, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament. From 2010-2019, he was Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of first Interinstitutional Relations and Administration, and then the Energy Union. In 2009-2010, he was European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth. From 2004 -2009, he was the Permanent Representative of the Slovak Republic to the European Union, contributing to the country’s major integration projects, such as its entry to the Eurozone and the Schengen area. As a diplomat by profession, he served between 1992 and 2004 in Zimbabwe and Canada and as Ambassador to Israel.

He graduated from the University of Economy in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the Moscow State Institute for Foreign Relations. He holds a degree as Doctor of Law and a PhD of European Law from Faculty of Law at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He also undertook training in diplomacy at Stanford University, USA.

He wrote a book “Driving the EU forward – talks with Maroš Šefčovič”, focused on his first mandate as the Commission Vice-President. In 2018, he was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at the Pan-European University in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Bio to be added soon.

Kelly Beaver is Chief Executive of Ipsos in the UK and Ireland. She has been with Ipsos for over a decade and was previously Managing Director of Ipsos’s UK Public Affairs division. Kelly holds several honorary positions external to Ipsos in academia and charities. She is passionate about the use of evidence in decision-making and her roles outside of Ipsos enable her to make a wider contribution to the social sciences discipline in promoting its use. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy for Social Sciences, a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, and a Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford University. She is also Trustee for the Government What Works Centre for Early Intervention. Kelly is a regular commentator in the national press and broadcast media. She is experienced at presenting to senior audiences on public and business leader opinion and societal and consumer trends across a range of topics including trust, gender equality, employee engagement, leadership, and many others.

Kelly was awarded an MBE in June 2022 as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to academia, research and the COVID-19 response.

Suzanne Lynch is the co-author of Brussels Playbook, Politico’s flagship morning newsletter. Prior to joining Politico, she worked as a foreign correspondent and finance reporter for the Irish Times. She covered US politics, including the tumultuous Trump years, as Washington Correspondent for the Irish Times between 2017 and 2021.

She was previously European Correspondent, based in Brussels, where she led coverage of the euro zone crisis, Brexit and the refugee crisis. She has also written extensively on financial and arts issues, and is a regular contributor to international TV and radio platforms.

She holds a BA from University College Dublin and a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University.

Anu Bradford is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School, a Director for Columbia’s European Legal Studies Center, and a Senior Scholar at Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School. Bradford is also a nonresident scholar in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on international trade law, European Union law, digital regulation, and comparative and international antitrust law.

Bradford earned her S.J.D. (2007) and LL.M. (2002) degrees from Harvard Law School and also holds a law degree from the University of Helsinki. After completing her LL.M. studies as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School, Bradford practiced antitrust law and European Union law at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels before returning to Harvard for her doctoral studies. She has also served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant to a member of the European Parliament. Bradford is the author of “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World” (OUP 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her next book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” will be published by the OUP in September 2023.

• He is the Head of unit “Trade and Cooperation Agreement” in the Secretariat-General of the European Commission.
• After various position in the Commission he joined the “Task Force” of M. Barnier in December 2016.
• During the negotiations of the Withdrawal Agreement he followed the topics “judicial cooperation”, “internal market for goods”, and data protection.
• During the negotiations of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement he followed the topics “goods – non fiscal”, transport, and fisheries.
• He also worked on “Brexit preparedness”

Stephen Phipson has been the Chief Executive of Make UK since joining in 2017.

Stephen previously spent 5 years as a senior civil servant holding the position of Head of the Defence and Security Organisation within the Department for International trade delivering export support to UK defence and security businesses and prior to this Stephen held the position of Director for Security Industry Engagement within the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office.

Before serving in the UK Government Stephen spent 35 years in senior roles in the manufacturing industry including 15 years with Smiths Group plc as President of Smiths Detection where he was awarded a CBE in 2010 for services to the Security industry. Stephen has worked extensively abroad in high technology manufacturing businesses and started his career as an engineering apprentice with the Plessey company.

Peter Foster is the Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times and author of the FT’s weekly Britain After Brexit newsletter. He joined the FT in April 2020 from the Telegraph Media Group where he had held the position of Europe editor since 2015, focusing on the Brexit negotiations. He has more than two decades of experience covering global affairs from all sides of the world, based in New Delhi and Beijing, as well as Washington DC, where he served as The Telegraph’s US editor from 2012.

Bio will appear here soon.

Duncan Robinson is The Economist’s political editor and Bagehot columnist. Prior to this Duncan was Brussels bureau chief and author of the Charlemagne column, as well as a political correspondent in London. Before joining the newspaper, he worked at the Financial Times.

Nathalie Loiseau is the chair of the sub-committee on Security and Defense (SEDE) and of the European Parliament’s delegation to the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly. She is also a member of the committees on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and on Foreign Interference in electoral processes, including disinformation (INGE).She led the Renaissance list during the 2019 European elections.

Minister for European Affairs in the French government from 2017 to 2019, she was the dean of the École nationale d’Administration (ENA) for five years, from 2012 to 2017, and diplomat within the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

She studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (IEP) and at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO).

She is the author of an essay on women’s rights, “Choisissez Tout” and of two comic books, “La Démocratie en BD” and “L’Europe en BD”.

David Lidington is Chair of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK’s foremost Defence and Security Policy think tank, and UK Chair of the Koenigswinter Conference (UK/Germany) and the Aurora Forum (UK/Nordics and Baltics). He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Centre for European Reform and Hon President of the Great Britain China Centre, a Foreign Office arms-length public body.

David represented Aylesbury in the House of Commons from 1992 to 2019.

As Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster he served as deputy to Prime Minister Theresa May from January 2018 to July 2019, having previously served in the May governments as Leader of the House of Commons and as Justice Secretary.

David served as Minister for Europe throughout the coalition government and David Cameron’s Conservative government (2010-2016), the UK’s longest-serving holder of that post. He held responsibility for the UK’s relations with more than 50 countries in Europe and Central Asia and represented the UK at the EU, NATO, OSCE, Council of Europe and the UN Security Council.

Dr. Roderick Parkes is deputy director of the research institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). He also heads the Alfred von Oppenheim Center for the Future of Europe, where he works on issues of European integration and the EU’s role in the world. He joined DGAP from the Institute for Security Studies, a Paris-based agency of the EU, where he provided advice to decision-makers on dealing with the intersection of EU internal security and foreign policy.

Over the past 15 years, Parkes has worked across Europe. At the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI), he worked on a special research project for the foreign ministry on the geopolitics of migration; at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), he headed the Europe Program; and at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), he worked as a researcher in Berlin before heading its liaison office to EU institutions and NATO.

Parkes holds a PhD from the University of Bonn and studied at Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and Sciences-Po Grenoble. He has taught at the European Security and Defense College, NATO School Oberammergau, and NATO Defense College.

Bio to be updated soon.

Biography will appear here shortly

Lindsay Appleby has been the UK’s Ambassador to the European Union since January 2021. Lindsay joined the (then) Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1996. Prior to his current role, Lindsay was the UK’s Deputy Chief Negotiator in the No. 10 Downing Street Europe Task Force during the negotiations of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He has also worked as the Director General for EU Exit in the FCO (2017 to 2020), Director Europe (2015 to 2017), Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Colombia (2012 to 2015), and Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary (2010 to 2012).

Reporting in possibly the most turbulent times on this continent since the Second World War, BBC Europe Editor Katya Adler has become one of the most popular and well-known of British broadcast journalists.

She is the BBC’s leading voice on Europe’s relations with the UK post-Brexit, the continental impact of the war in Ukraine and European attitudes towards Russia, China and the United States. Her extensive interviews with political leaders across the continent and years of experience covering European politics, society and current affairs have given her unique insider knowledge.

Katya is also an expert on populism across Europe, the future of the EU, the ongoing energy crisis and as a former Middle East war correspondent, she is well-versed in Europe’s relations with that region too.

Katya provides analysis and context on TV, radio and online via her ‘Europe Editor’ blog on the BBC news website. She is the recipient of two honorary university doctorates and numerous news and current affairs awards.

Career Background

Katya’s journalistic career began in Vienna with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation where she reported across Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. On her way to fulfilling her early-career dream of becoming a BBC war correspondent, Katya covered the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

She joined the BBC firstly as a freelancer from Vienna, then in London from 2000, covering European affairs as both presenter and roving reporter. She also commuted to Berlin to appear regularly as a news anchor on Deutsche Welle Television.

In 2003, Katya became the BBC’s Madrid correspondent, covering the Madrid train bombings in 2004 which took place close to the flat where she was living. She also travelled regularly across the continent to cover breaking stories.

In 2006, she became the BBC’s Middle East correspondent based out of Jerusalem, specialising in war reporting across the region.

Katya also presented on the BBC’s hard-hitting interview-based programme ‘Hardtalk’. She appeared as a news presenter on BBC World News, an investigative reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight and has written/presented a number of acclaimed one hour current affairs documentaries.

Awards

In acknowledgement of her expertise and extensive reporting, Katya has been awarded two honorary doctorates (Bristol University and University of London). She was named Broadcast Journalist of the year at the Political Society Awards 2018. In 2019 she was named Broadcast Journalist of the Year, alongside her BBC colleague, Laura Kunsberg by the London Press Club. She is also the 2019 recipient of the the British Journalism Review and University of Westminster’s Charles Wheeler award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism. The Brexitcast podcast which she co-hosted with three other colleagues received the Listeners Choice award at the British podcast awards 2019 – the same year as the London Evening Standard newspaper named her as one of the city’s most influential people. In 2022 Bristol University named Katya their Arts and Media Alumnus of the Year

Linguist 

Katya speaks fluent German, Italian, Spanish, and French plus some Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to her mother-tongue, English.

Paul Adamson is chairman of Forum Europe and Forum Global and founder of Encompass (previously E!Sharp), an online magazine and discussion space dedicated to covering the European Union and Europe’s place in the world.

Paul is a member of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board and Rand Europe’s Council of Advisors. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute, King’s College London, a Senior Adviser at the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey. He is a patron of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.

In 2012, Paul was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) “for services to promoting understanding of the European Union” and in 2016 he was made a Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite by the French government.