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Klaus Welle is the former Secretary-General of the European Parliament, a role in which he served from 2009 to 2022. He Chairs the Martens Centre's Academic Council. He is also a Guest Professor in practice at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven.

After Obtaining a Degree in economics from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany, Welle worked at the CDU Central Office in Bonn, before coming to Brussels where he served as Secretary-General of the European People's Party (EPP) from 1994 to 1999, Secretary-General of the EPP-ED Group in European Parliament from 1999-2003, Director-General for Internal Policies at the European Parliament from 2004 to 2007, Head of Cabinet of the President of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009, and Secretary-General of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2022.

Born in India, and raised in Belize, Sayu Bhojwani is a proud New Yorker who served as the City's first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. She founded and led South Asian Youth Action (1997), New American Leaders (2010) and Women's Democracy Lab (2021).

For over three decades, she has activated change in nonprofit and government settings, speaking across the country and internationally, and writing on how immigrants and women of color can shape the world we want to see. She is the author of the 2018 book People Like Us and maintains the newsletter No. 1 Immigrant Daughter on Substack.

Avery Williams is a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with focuses in political theory and American political thought. He works primarily on moral theory, authoritarianism, political psychology, and the history of political thought. His dissertation examined the political psychology of tyrants in the thought of the early Socratics. His current research attempts to bring classical understandings of tyranny into dialogue with later perspectives—most notably early modern philosophy, the thought of the Frankfurt School, and democratic theory.

Charles Nathan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2023. His work examines the politics of nostalgia, memory, and the urban rural divide in the history of political thought. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, History of Political Thought, and Theory & Event. He is currently working on a book project about the concept of the golden age in ancient political thought.