Cesare Merlini is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Institute for International Affairs in Rome (IAI). Until 2009, he occupied the position of executive vice chairman of the Council for the United States and Italy, which he co-founded in 1983. His areas of expertise include transatlantic relations, European integration, nuclear non-proliferation and the impact of societal change on international affairs.

Mr. Merlini’s recent publications in English include a chapter entitled “Europe in the International Scene: a Union of Necessity after a Union of Choice?” in Stefano Micossi and Gian Luigi Tosato (eds.), The European Union in the 21st Century. Perspectives from the Lisbon Treaty (Brussels: CEPS, 2009) and “The Lessons of Ancient History and the Future of Transatlantic Relations”, The International Spectator, no 44, vol. 1, March 2009. He is also a member of EuropEos, a multidisciplinary group discussing EU matters, and of the Editorial Board of Foreign Policy.

Prior to becoming a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Merlini was the president of the Italian Institute for International Affairs in Rome (IAI). He co-founded the Council for the United States and Italy in 1983 and, until 2009 he served as its executive vice chairman. He was the co-editor of Global-FP, an Italian bimonthly magazine affiliated with Foreign Policy (2001-2004) and the chairman of the Board of UTET, a major Italian publishing company based in Turin (1999-2002). For 25 years he was a member of the Trilateral Commission, beginning with the Tokyo inaugural meeting in 1973. From 1983 to 1992, Mr. Merlini served on the Board of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which he remains a member. He held the chair of Nuclear Technologies at the Polytechnic University of Turin (1976-1985) and was a nuclear scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, in 1963 and 1964.

Mr. Merlini was born in 1933. He is married and has four children and eight grandchildren. He has a BA diploma in Humanities (1952), and a diploma in industrial engineering (1959), specializing in nuclear engineering (1960).

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