Ms. Maronkova is an established public diplomacy expert with over 15 years of experience with NATO. She currently serves as the Communications Advisor on NATO’s Strategic Concept at the Policy Planning Unit of the Office of Secretary General. She held various functions including as the Acting Director of NATO Information Office in Moscow and served as the Director of the NATO Information and Documentation Centre in Ukraine from March, 2017 till September 2020. Previously she worked in NATO’s Press and Media office and managed public diplomacy campaigns in the Western Balkans. In this capacity, she advised candidate countries on their national public awareness campaigns on NATO membership. Before joining NATO in 2006 she established and headed a Slovak-based NGO Centre for European and North Atlantic Affairs to contribute to the public and academic debate on Slovakia’s membership to the EU and NATO. Her work included public relations and media appearances, public speaking, donors and stakeholders relations as well as the management of the NGO. A graduate of the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, Barbora is also an alumnus of the CPD Summer Institute and holds a Public Affairs diploma from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK. Maronkova was also a Non-resident research fellow with the Centre on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California (2015-2017) and is a frequent contributor to academic writings on public diplomacy and strategic communications.