Dr Ionela Maria Ciolan is a Research Officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, focusing on European foreign policy, security and defence.
She is also a Re.Think CEE Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Previously, she was a security and defence researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, a research fellow at the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels, and a James S. Denton Transatlantic Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington. She gained extensive international policy expertise through her work at the University of California-Berkeley, the European Parliament and the Centre for EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu.
Ionela holds a PhD from the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania) on the dynamics of the Eastern Neighbourhood between the EU’s multilateral values and Russia’s great power politics (with a focus on Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia). Her work is widely published and cited across international policy circles and the media.
