Valbona Zeneli is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and a professor of National Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. She also serves as the chair of strategic engagements in the Department of Strategic Security Studies. Her portfolio covers the Ukraine Defense Reform Program and the Senior Executive Leadership Program, the latter focusing on capacity building for parliamentarians and ministerial level professionals. She is also the coordinator for the Loisach Group which is a German-American policy and security forum focused on transatlantic security issues facing the United States and Germany. She is part of the Transatlantic Leadership Network’s NATO Task Force, comprised of European and North American diplomats, military experts, and security analysts focused on NATO affairs. Zeneli was a nonresident Europe’s future Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, focusing her research on Chinese influence in the Balkans.

Zeneli studied in Italy where she earned a PhD in political economy from the University of Bari and a BS in business administration from the University of Bologna. She has completed executive education and graduate studies programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Georgetown University.

Zeneli has published numerous academic papers, book chapters, and policy papers and is a frequent contributor to international magazines. She has delivered more than one hundred presentations in more than thirty countries, and is a frequent lecturer at the NATO School, the US Foreign Service Institute, and European defense academies. Zeneli hosts the Marshall Center Voices, a video podcast where she conducts interviews with senior government officials, members of the US Congress, ambassadors, and renowned academics.

She speaks Italian, Albanian, German, and some Spanish.