Talk: Is Europe Falling Behind in the Race for Technology?

Emily Benson is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and head of strategy at Minerva Technology Futures, where she advises transatlantic clients on geopolitical risks that affect trade and investment decisions, primarily relating to AI, semiconductors, and other critical technologies. She previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Commerce in a unit focused on geopolitical risk in critical supply chains. She also directed the Project on Trade and Technology at CSIS in Washington, D.C., and worked in legislative affairs and international trade law in the EU-U.S. context. Her work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and on television, including the BBC, Bloomberg, and CNN. She received her joint BA in international affairs and political science from the University of Colorado and her MA in political science from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Fluent in French, Emily has lived abroad in France, Indonesia, and Switzerland.

Prof. Anu Bradford is a leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union, global economy, and digital regulation, and coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her newest book, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, was published in September 2023. It was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times, and awarded the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. At the Law School, Bradford is the Director of the European Legal Studies Center. She is also a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining the Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU law and antitrust law in Brussels; and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland, and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10.  Bradford is a frequent keynote speaker at events hosted by universities, think tanks, international organizations, governments, and companies, in the United States and internationally. Her research and public commentary is regularly featured in top international news outlets, including The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Katrin Zimmermann is a (digital) transformation expert and in her 8 years with Omnicom has been working with clients in moments of (digital) transformation, change and consumerization moments in marketing. She helps clients navigate times of change within the digital age, advising some of the world’s leading companies on marketing, digital strategy, business model innovation, and organizational transformation in CPG, automotive and healthcare. For Bayer she previously helped develop and launch the go-to-market strategy for Leaps by Bayer. Prior to joining Omnicom, Katrin worked for the Lufthansa Group in various positions from Executive Assistant to the Group CFO and CHRO to co-founding the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, a corporate innovation unit where she built a startup in the conversational AI commerce space in South Korea and Germany. She is a Member of the Board of Directors of the German American Chamber of Commerce in New York and of Effie Worldwide Inc. She is a thought leader in marketing, innovation and AI, currently teaching an AI Innovation course at Pratt Institute in New York.

Dr. Jan Lüdert is Head of Programs at the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York. Jan earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC). He holds Harvard Kennedy’s School Public Leadership Credential; a First-Class Honors MA in International Relations from the Australian National University; and a BA in Public Policy from Hamburg University for Economics and Politics. He previously served as Associate Professor at City University of Seattle where he was the inaugural Director of Curriculum and Instruction. He held positions as Visiting Research Scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at City University of New York's Graduate Center as well as Research Associate with the DFG 'Dynamics of Security' project at Philipps Marburg University. He is an alumnus of Seattle's World Affairs Council Fellows and UBC Liu Institute for Global Issues Scholar programs.