Katherine D. Wilkins is a PhD Candidate at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. Katherine’s current research focuses on international anti-corruption governance. Her broader interests include how anti-democratic behavior is connected to power preservation and the consolidation of corruption networks, and civil society empowerment to expose and contest corruption.

Katherine has more than 10 years of experience and regional expertise on Russia and Eurasia. Most recently, Katherine was Project Director at Mayak Intelligence, a London-based consulting firm. Previously, she advanced the efforts of Open Society Foundations Budapest/Berlin to expose and contest corrupt practices across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.

As a 2015-2016 Alfa Fellowship recipient in Moscow, she had postings at the Laboratory for Anti-Corruption Policy, a joint center of Transparency International Russia and the Moscow Higher School of Economics and the consulting firms Control Risks Russia/CIS and PBN H+K Strategies. Katherine evaluated kleptocratic networks for Sarah Chayes, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment (“When Corruption is the Operating System: The Case of Honduras”), administered programs at the Center for Global Affairs, and conducted graduate fieldwork on corruption risks in security assistance for Transparency International Secretariat.

Katherine holds an M.P.A. in International Policy & Management from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Services and a B.A. in Russian area studies, also from NYU.