Studied at London University, the Free University of West Berlin and Lancaster University. Michael was the Leader of a Regional Council in the UK and a Member of the European Parliament for three terms, where he was Vice-President of the External Economic Affairs Committee. He has been an Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC and a guest lecturer at several universities, including University of California, Berkeley; Greifwald and Gottingen Universities, Germany; Keio University Tokyo; Taras Schevchenko University, Kyiv; City University, Geneva. Michael has been an election observer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the countries of the former Soviet Union. He has also acted as an adviser to the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and as researcher for the Council of Europe. Michael writes frequently for the British and international press on politics and his book on EU/UK relations, “The Semi-Detached European” is on the syllabus of several universities. He is currently the Coordinator of the Former MEPs “European Parliament to campus” programme.

Jean-Marc Lieberherr is one of Jean Monnet’s four grandchildren. He began his career in 1991 at LVMH in Japan and then in Taiwan before joining Unilever in 1999 where he held marketing and general management positions. From 2005 to 2015 he took over as marketing director and then general manager of the Rio Tinto division in charge of the extraction and marketing of rough diamonds from Australia, Canada, Zimbabwe and India. In 2016 he founded and took over the management of the Natural Diamond Council, a professional association acting on behalf of diamond mining companies including De Beers, Rio Tinto and Alrosa, to promote the category and defend the interests of the diamond sector. Since 2020, he has devoted himself to his personal and family projects, including the creation of the Jean Monnet Institute. He is a graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, holds a master’s degree in econometrics (University of Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne) and an MBA from INSEAD.

Johan Nissinen (born May 17, 1989) is a Swedish politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2022 to 2024. He was previously a member of the Swedish Parliament (Riksdag) from 2014 to 2018, representing the Sweden Democrats. During his time in the Riksdag, he was active in the Industry and Trade Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the EU Committee. He also served in the Swedish delegation to the Council of Europe from 2015 to 2019.
In addition to his national and European roles, Nissinen was a member of the Värnamo City Council from 2010 to 2019. Upon joining the European Parliament in 2022, he took over from Jessica Stegrud and focused on industry and energy policy, healthcare, women’s rights and gender equality, as well as economic and monetary affairs.

Alexander Schaebler, Captain of the German Armed Forces, worked as a psychiatric nurse in a hospital before joining the military. He is 43 years old and holds a degree in business administration and a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies. During foreign deployments in Afghanistan and Mali, he served in multinational units for the EU and NATO. Subsequently, he continued to serve as a military instructor and trainer, eventually serving at the EU and NATO levels in a multinational coordination centre during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, he is a security policy consultant (known as a “youth information officer”) in Potsdam, close to Berlin. Youth information officers are available to all people interested in security policy or the Bundeswehr. He contributes regularly to national and international military formats on the topic of military adaption.

Julie Ward was a Labour MEP for NW England from 2014-2020. She was Vice Chair of the Culture &Education Committee and a member of of the Committees for Women’s Rights & Gender Equality, Economic & Monetary Affairs and Regional Development. Julie was Vice-Chair of the Parliament’s Child Rights Intergroup and Co-Chair of the Anti-racism & Diversity Intergroup as well as being an active member of the Intergroups for LGBT+, Disability, Youth, Trade Unions, Anti-poverty and Cultural Industries. She was a member of the Social and Environment Committee of the EU-ACP Joint Parliamentary Assembly, and a member of the Delegation for Relations with Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo.

Prior to being elected Julie worked in the creative industries. She returned to the sector in 2020, working mostly as an arts in education consultant. She was the co-ordinator for the international arts in education programme for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. In 2024 she edited the English language version of the Youth Addendum of the Porto Santo Charter, an initiative of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Council. Since 2020 she has been a volunteer with Culture Declares Emergency and
Festival of Thrift, the UK’s festival of sustainability. Julie was recently appointed to an Expert Group on Climate and Sustainability for the European Libraries and Archives Network.

Julie holds a Masters in Education and International Development from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is an Honorary Fellow of Durham University’s Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing.

Clémence Albert-Lebrun is an assistant at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. She has worked in European affairs for 5 years and is now specialised in research policy and stakeholder management.

After graduating from the LFA in 2016, she received her bachelor’s degree from Université Paris- Dauphine PSL and completed a double master’s degree at the Jagellonian University in Krakow and

Sciences Po Strasbourg. She then specialised in European political affairs with an advanced master’s degree at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Before joining the European Commission, Clémence worked in French local government in Nancy, and as a research assistant at the Université Lyon 2.