Sponsored Chairs

In North America, DAAD currently sponsors one Chair:

• Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professorship for German and European Studies at Johns Hopkins University

Prof. Dr. Gerlinde Groitl
Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor for German and European Studies at Johns Hopkins University

Gerlinde Groitl is a political scientist and internationally recognized expert in U.S., German, European, and NATO security and defense policy, as well as in great power competition between Russia, China, and the West. She is the founder and director of the ISS Institute for Security and Strategy GmbH in Munich and a Professor of International Politics at the University of Regensburg, Germany. As of AY 2026-2027, she is the Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a visiting professorship supported by the DAAD and the German Federal Foreign Office.

She previously worked at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, the University of Passau and the Chair of International Politics at the University of Regensburg. In recent years, she has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, the university think tank LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Masaryk University in Brno, among others. She has been a member of the board of the German Society for Political Science (DGfP) since 2023. She holds degrees from the University of Regensburg and has completed certificate programmes at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Her scholarly work focuses on matters of security and strategy with a special focus on the US, Germany, Europe, NATO as well as great power competition in a changing global order. The last of her to-date three monographs developed a neoclassical realist model of order contestation and analyzed Russia’s and China’s revisionist assault on the US-led international order. Her current book project deals with crisis and renewal in the transatlantic relationship. Groitl’s work bridges the worlds of academia, statecraft, and the wider public. She is, among others, an alumna of the “Young Leaders in Security Policy” program of the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin, a member of the board of the German Association of Political Science (DGfP), and a frequent media contributor.