Michael Haltzel is Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University SAIS.  From 2006 to 2018, he was Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations.  Dr. Haltzel served as Democratic Staff Director of the Subcommittee on European Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senior Advisor to former U.S. Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.  from 1994 to 2005.  As the lead Democratic staffer on NATO and Balkan policy, he was deeply involved in NATO enlargement and in the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns. From 2009 to 2010, Haltzel headed U.S. government delegations to multi-week OSCE review conferences in Warsaw, Copenhagen, and Vienna.

Haltzel's previous positions include Chief of the European Division of the Library of Congress, Director of West European Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Vice President for Academic Affairs of Longwood University in Virginia, and Deputy Director of the Aspen Institute Berlin. In the year 2015 to 2016 Haltzel was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki.

Author of Der Abbau der deutschen ständischen Selbstverwaltung in den Ostseeprovinzen Russlands 1855-1905 (Marburg, 1977), Haltzel is coauthor, editor, or coeditor of nine other books.  His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.  He is a frequent commentator on U.S. and European television and for several years was a blogger for the Huffington Post.

He received a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University, and M.A. and Ph.D., from Harvard University. Haltzel is the recipient of state decorations from seven countries of the European Union:  Austria, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Sweden.