Jan Erik Surotchak serves as Senior Director for Transatlantic Strategy at the International Republican Institute (IRI). He has lived and worked in Central Europe for over two decades and has taken part in election observation missions and political assessments worldwide for IRI, among others in Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, China, Haiti, Honduras, Jordan, Nigeria, Somaliland, and Turkey. Surotchak is also IRI’s lead on relationships with political parties in the European Union, in particular with the European People’s Party (EPP), the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party, and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), as well as with the International Democrat Union (IDU), the global alliance of center-right parties. He co-edited IRI’s Why We Lost: Explaining the Rise and Fall of the Center-Right in Central and Eastern Europe, 1996-2002, and Why and How We Won: Center-Right Parties in East-Central Europe and Their Return to Power in the 2000s. Jan holds an MA in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a BA in International Relations from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He also won a Fulbright Fellowship in Kiel, Germany.