Lecture & Discussion

»President Obama’s First Year: Challenges at Home and Abroad«

William Drozdiak is one of the leading heads on transatlantic affairs. He gained his expertise from the work in leading US-European facilities and as a journalist for the Washington Post and the Time Magazin on both sides of the atlantic. At the University of Cologne he gave a presentation of President Barack Obama's first year in office.

Before taking the helm of the American Council on Germany in Febuary 2005, William Drozdiak was Execuitve Director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The center, which was created in 2001 to serve as the first independent American policy institute in Brussels devoted to U.S.-European relations, serves as a base of operations for distinguished American scholars, policy analysts, and journalists conducting research on the Atlantic partnership.

William Drozdiak worked for two decades as an editor and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. As a Chief European Correspondent until 2001, he was primerly responsible for covering major political, economic, and security issues across Europe, with special emphasis on NATO and European Union. From 1990 to 2000, he served as the Post's Bureau Chief in Paris and Berlin. For his coverage of NATO's air war on Kosovo, he was part of a Washington Post team selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for international addairs in 1999. Before joining the Post, Mr. Drozdiak worked as State Department Correspondent for Time magazine and later covered the Middle East while based in Cairo and Beirut for Time and Washington Star.