Abigaël Vasselier heads the Foreign Relations team at MERICS. Previously, Abigaël worked as Deputy Head of Division for China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Mongolia at the European External Action Service (EEAS).

Abigaël holds a Master’s degree in Asian Studies from SOAS in London and she also graduated in International Relations from Sciences Po Aix and has a Bachelor degree in Chinese language. She studied Chinese at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

Eva Seiwert is an analyst in the Foreign Relations team and is a project coordinator for the EU-funded China Horizons (“Dealing with a resurgent China”) consortium at MERICS. Previously, Eva was a postdoctoral research fellow in the project “Academic freedom, globalized scholarship and the rise of authoritarian China” at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and managing editor of 9Dashline. She gathered working experience at Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Leipzig, King’s College in London and the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. Eva holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin exploring the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and China’s strategy of shaping international norms. She studied at Lanzhou University in China and was a visiting researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.