Pavol Demeš is a renowned Slovak expert in international relations and civil society, a non-resident senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), and an external advisor to the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he worked as a bio-medical researcher at Comenius University in Bratislava and graduated from Charles University in Prague. After the democratic changes of 1989, he co-founded the Slovak Academic Information Agency for the Third Sector, a leading NGO in Slovakia, and served in the Slovak government, first at the Ministry of Education and later as Minister of International Relations (1991-92) and Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the Slovak Republic, Michal Kováč (1993-97). He was awarded a six-month public policy research fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. in 1999 and served as the GMF Director for Central and Eastern Europe based in Bratislava from 2000 to 2010.
