Verena Knaus is a founding member of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), a non-profit think tank with offices in Pristina, Istanbul, Brussels and Berlin.

Before joining ESI, she studied modern history at Oxford and international relations and economics at The Johns Hopkins University. She first came to Kosovo in summer 2001 to set up a Lessons Learned and Analysis Unit, a joint project of ESI and the UN administration in Kosovo. During those years, she researched and published extensively on Kosovo's post-war economy, international governance, minorities and migration.

In 2004, she moved to Turkey, where she researched and published on Turkey's Europeanisation. After a short stint at Yale as a World Fellow, she returned to Kosovo in January 2007, just in time for independence. Austrian by nationality, she is a passionate skier, camper, marathon runner and traveller. For many years, she led academic and biking tours across Europe. She speaks fluent German, Albanian, French, Italian and some Turkish.

Gail Warrander was a lawyer in the City of London and then for Reuters. On a commuter train she was drawn by an advert in The Economist and left 'the big smoke' to help with the EU-funded economic reconstruction effort in Kosovo.

After three years working on infrastructure and privatisation projects she switched to working directly for the business community of Kosovo, running her own commercial law firm in Kosovo and working extensively with foreign and local investors.