Diego Varela Pedreira

I am associate professor in the department of political science, international relations and European studies of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi. I studied economics in Spain, including a semester as an Erasmus student in Finland and two months as a volunteer in Brazil. I did my graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from which I earned an MSc in European Studies (with distinction) in 1998, and a PhD in Government in 2002, with a thesis on The power of voice: an informational model of the legislative powers of the European Parliament under the supervision of Simon Hix. I did my whole graduate studies with scholarships from Fundación Caixagalicia, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, The British Council, and Fundación Ramón Areces. I was also a Robert Schuman scholar in the DG for Research of the European Parliament in Luxembourg. I coordinated two Jean Monnet modules, in Spain (2002) and Romania (2014), before I earned a Jean Monnet Chair in European Political Economy and founded the EUROSCI Network in 2016. Prior to that, I also set up and coordinated Universidade da Coruña's International Summer School (2014-2016), and founded and edited the European Journal of Government and Economics (2012-2016). I have also been a visiting professor at several Romanian universities. I am the author of two books, on The government of the EU (2007, in Spanish and Romanian), and Population policy (2016, in Romanian). I am married and have two sons. Besides my family, my interests lie in the fields of international and EU politics.