Speaker Bio

Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is an author, publisher, journalist, and scholar. During the 1980s and 1990s, Kounalakis worked as a foreign correspondent, covering wars and revolutions for Newsweek based in Rome and Vienna. He later ran the magazine’s Prague bureau before working in the USSR as the NBC-Mutual News Moscow correspondent. Kounalakis later became president and publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine. Dr. Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an award-winning foreign affairs columnist. He currently teaches Stanford University’s political science capstone class, “Superpower California”. President Barack Obama appointed him to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He is California’s “Second Gentleman”, married to Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis. His authored books include Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton, Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering, and the recently released Freedom isn’t Free: The Price of World Order.