Ionela Ciolan

Research Officer

Dr. Ionela Maria Ciolan is a Research Officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, focusing on European Foreign Policy, Security and Defence. Her areas of interest and expertise include European Security and Defence Policy, European Foreign Policy, NATO, Black Sea security, Arctic security, transatlantic relations, and EU relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.

In addition, Ionela is a 2023-2024 Re.Think CEE Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and part of the 2023 Transatlantic Security Initiative of the International Republican Institute. Previously, she worked as a security and defence researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Prior to that, she was 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 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and through her work at the European Parliament, the Centre for EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu, and the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania.

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 policy research has been published by CEPA, EPC, GLOBSEC and the European Defence Agency. Her work has been quoted in several international media.

Ionela is an alumna of the Manfred Wörner Seminar of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Germany (2022), the GLOBSEC Young Leaders Forum (2022), and the OSCE and UN Office for Disarmament Affairs Scholarship for Peace and Security (2019). She was a New Security Leader of the Warsaw Security Forum (2018) and a Professional Fellow of the US Department of State (2015).