Alina Polyakova is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), as well as Donald Marron Senior Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. She is a recognised expert on transatlantic relations, European security, Russian foreign policy, digital authoritarianism and populism in democracies.

Prior to joining CEPA she was Founding Director of Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at Brookings Institution and Director of Research for Europe and Eurasia at the Atlantic Council. She is a Board Member of the Free Russia Foundation and the Institute of Modern Russia.

She has received numerous prestigious fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. She is the author of the book The Dark Side of European Integration, as well as dozens of major reports and articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic, among others. She is a regular commentator in media outlets such as Fox News, CNN and BBC.

She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Emory University.