Piotr Arak is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. Arak is an economist with extensive experience across government, academia, and the private sector. From 2018 to 2023, he served as director of the Polish Economic Institute, where he built the organization into one of the most influential think tanks in Central and Eastern Europe. He is currently chief economist at VeloBank and lectures as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw. His expertise covers international trade as well as fiscal and monetary policy, on which he regularly writes and comments.

Earlier in his career, Arak worked at Deloitte, the analytical center Polityka Insight, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Polish prime minister’s office. He holds a PhD and MA in social sciences from the University of Warsaw, an MBA from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Warsaw School of Economics, and an executive certificate in economic development from Harvard Kennedy School.

He has been awarded the Badge of Merit for Public Finance by Poland’s finance minister and is an alumnus of the Leadership Academy for Poland. He speaks English and German, in addition to his native Polish.