Gergely Prőhle is a former ambassador and the program director of the John Lukacs Institute at the Ludovika University of Public Service (LUPS) and the director of the Habsburg Otto Foundation. He studied German studies, Hungarian studies, and international relations in Budapest, Jena, and Hamburg, graduating from the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University in 1989. Throughout his professional career, he worked at the ELTE Language Teaching Institute and led the Friedrich Naumann Foundation's representation in Hungary. In 1998, he became the Undersecretary of State for Public Administration at the Ministry of Culture. From 2000 to 2005, he served as Hungary's ambassador to Berlin and Bern. After that, he worked in various positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, interrupted by four years in the business sector as an employee of an international consulting company. As Deputy State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later the Ministry of Human Resources, he supervised European Union relations, including the Visegrad Group cooperation and the Central European Initiative. Since 2006, he has been the Hungarian Lutheran Church's lay leader and received high state honours from Germany, Italy, and Poland.