Dr. Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). She leads ECFR’s Technology and European Power initiative. Her areas of focus include German and European security and defence, the future of warfare, and the impact of new technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence on geopolitics and warfare.

Ulrike has published widely on these and other topics, among others in Die Zeit, FAZ, RUSI Whitehall Papers, Comparative Strategy, War on the Rocks, Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, and regularly appears as commentator in the media. She co-hosts the Sicherheitshalber Podcast, the leading German-language podcast on security and defence. Ulrike is also a policy affiliate at the Governance of AI project at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute.

Ulrike holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford – in her PhD thesis, she studied the use of drones by western armed forces. For this research, she received the John McCain Dissertation Award by the Munich Security Conference. She also holds a BA from Sciences Po Paris and a double summa cum laude MA degree from Sciences Po Paris (Affaires internationales/Sécurité internationale) and the University of St. Gallen (International Affairs and Governance).