Dragan Tilev is a State Counsellor for EU Affairs at the Secretariat for European Affairs and a Member of the Cabinet of the Deputy Prime Minister. He has 37 years of experience as a civil servant and 27 years working on North Macedonia’s EU integration process. Since 1997, he has held the position of state counsellor, leading the sector for European integration.  Dragan Tilev has been coordinating the activities of the Secretariat for European Affairs since 2005. He was a member of the SAA negotiation team and the chair of the SAA Committee from 2004 to 2007 and again from 2009 to 2010). Between 2010 and2014, he worked in Brussels as minister counsellor at the Mission of North Macedonia to the EU. He has acquired strong regional experience working on different projects in Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Ukraine. Dragan Tilev has also led national cross-border cooperation programmes with Greece and Bulgaria and was the national contact point for TAEX and Twinning.