Markos Kounalakis
Wilson Council
Vice Chairman, Board of Advisors, Southeast Europe Project

Biography
Markos is a print and network broadcast journalist and author who covered wars and revolutions, both civil and technological. He worked as the NBC Radio and Mutual News Moscow correspondent and covered the fall of the Soviet Union as well as the war in Afghanistan. He reported the overthrow of communism for Newsweek in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, the rise of both democratic institutions in Hungary and of ethnic strife in Yugoslavia. He was based in Rome and Vienna and later ran the magazine's Prague satellite bureau for over a year. Kounalakis has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The International Herald-Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and many other regional and international newspapers and magazines.

He has written two books, Defying Gravity: The Making of Newton (Beyond Words Publishing, 1993) and Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism (co-author, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999).

He was born to Greek refugees in San Francisco in 1956 and received a public education, including his undergraduate years at University of California, Berkeley (1978, Political Science). He received his MSc in Journalism from Columbia University (1988), was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe (1988-1989), and an International Journalism Graduate Fellow at the University of Southern California (1995-1996).

He serves on the Board of Visitors at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; Board of Advisors at Georgetown College; on both the Wilson Council at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and on the Center's Board of Advisors for the Southeast Europe Project; and formerly served as Chairman of Internews Network 2002-2004; Vice Chairman of the California State World Trade Commission 2001-2003; Board of Trustees of the Western Policy Center 2001-2005. In June 2003, he chaired a multinational reconstruction conference in Athens, Greece, where Iraq's media laws were drafted.