Scott Cullinane is the Director of Government Affairs at Razom for Ukraine, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to unlocking the potential of Ukraine and building U.S.-Ukrainian ties. Before this, he was the founding Executive Director of the U.S.-Europe Alliance, a bipartisan, not-for-profit foundation dedicated to mobilizing Americans to advocate for the enduring strategic and economic partnership between the U.S. and Europe. Prior to this, he served in various positions with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, including as Professional Staff Member for the Europe Subcommittee, where he was responsible for a jurisdiction including the European Union, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Prior to this, he worked as a Staff Associate for the Foreign Affairs Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. In those capacities, he played an integral role in managing subcommittee hearings, planning numerous congressional delegations, and coordinating legislative texts. From 2013 to 2014, he worked as the Director of Government Relations for Aeros, a California-based aviation and defense company.
Mr. Cullinane was the recipient of the 2021 Helmut Schmidt Fellowship hosted by the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, Germany. This prestigious position commemorates the life, service, and legacy of Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
He is currently a Fellow at the National Security Institute, part of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and in the past has worked as an instructor for the American University of Central Asia. He has been selected to participate in numerous fellowships, including as a Penn Kemble Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy, the Congressional Foreign Policy Fellowship with the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Young Leaders Forum with GLOBSEC. He is currently a member of the “Friends of the European Humanities University,” a Belarusian university operating in Lithuania.
Mr. Cullinane holds a B.A. in history from Saint Mary’s College of California and an M.A. in national security affairs from the Institute of World Politics.
Dr. Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS. She works on national security challenges facing the United States and Europe, focusing on Russia, authoritarianism, and threats to democracy, and the state of the transatlantic alliance.
Prior to joining CNAS, Dr. Kendall-Taylor served for eight years as a senior intelligence officer. From 2015 to 2018, she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). In this role, she led the U.S. intelligence community’s (IC) strategic analysis on Russia, represented the IC in interagency policy meetings, provided analysis to the National Security Council, and briefed the DNI and other senior staff for White House and international meetings. Prior to joining the NIC, Dr. Kendall-Taylor was a senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency where she worked on Russia and Eurasia, the political dynamics of autocracies, and democratic decline.
Outside CNAS, Dr. Kendall-Taylor has been a CNN national security analyst. She is also a Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Her work has been published in numerous political science and policy journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, Journal of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The Washington Quarterly, and Foreign Policy.
Dr. Kendall-Taylor received her BA in politics from Princeton University and her PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a Fulbright scholar in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where she conducted dissertation research on oil and autocracy.
Hannah Thoburn is a Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute specializing in Russian and Ukrainian politics, civil society in Eurasia, and the U.S. relationship with Eastern Europe. Her work has examined the manipulation of historical memory for political purposes, disinformation tactics and campaigns, Vladimir Putin’s foreign and domestic policy goals, as well as Russian influence in Latin America. Ms. Thoburn has also served as an election monitor in Ukraine and a poll worker in Washington, DC. Before joining Hudson, she was a Senior Research Assistant at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution as well as a Eurasia Analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative. She spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in southern Ukraine.
Ms. Thoburn holds an M.A. in International Relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in International Affairs from Florida State University.
Dr. Dominik Tolksdorf (moderator) joined DGAP in June 2022. He works as a research fellow in the area of US/transatlantic relations at the Alfred von Oppenheim Center for the Future of Europe. Previously, he had worked as a program director for foreign and security policy at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, DC since 2016. There, he focused on current developments in transatlantic relations and US and EU policies toward the EU neighborhood, especially Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, and the Balkans. Together with partners in the United States and Europe, he organized visitor programs, international study tours, workshops, and media fellowships.
Before that, Dr. Tolksdorf worked as a researcher, visiting fellow, and lecturer in Washington at the US Institute of Peace and SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations, in Paris at the Institut français des relations internationales, in Brussels at the Institute for European Studies and Vesalius College, and in Munich at the Center for Applied Policy Research.
Tolksdorf holds a PhD from LMU Munich. In 2012, his book on the European Union’s policy toward Bosnia and Herzegovina, Die EU und Bosnien-Herzegowina: Außenpolitik auf der Suche nach Kohärenz, was published by Nomos.
