I majored both BA and MA in Political Science, attending undergraduate and graduate courses at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, University of Bergen and University of Oslo. In September 2013 I was granted a research scholarship at Haifa University, in order to conduct research on the transition to constitutionalism and its effects over military and religious institutions. In the last years I have published a couple of papers and a short volume. Moreover, I have been working as a cultural referent for a theatre and as an inspector for the Directorate of Development and European Projects of Iasi Municipality. In June 2014, after resuming my research project, I took over the coordination of the Brussels Office of ADR Nord-Est, North-East Romania Regional Development Agency, dealing with the region’s lobby in the EU’s capital. In the summer of 2015 I attended the intensive training on Peace and Conflict Resolution at UC Berkeley. Other post-graduate and executive courses followed. In the past years, I have been involved in very diverse cooperation and project initiatives.

In 2014-2016 I have been co-leading and co-steering the cooperation initiative based on S3 in between North-East Romania and the Northern Netherlands. It was a fantastic journey, with high level meetings, grass-roots debates, living labs, mirrored EDPs and so many other experiments, putting on the table very courageous ideas about inter-regional investments. Our initiative encountered a lot of resistance, but we cherish today the adoption of some of the principles and practices we were preaching in those times, partially transposed in I3 initiative. For sure we were not the only ones, but we feel we are part of the positive changes. 

In 2018-2019 I was the project manager of the WIRE X Conference – The Week of Innovative Regions in Europe, in Iasi, Romania, one of the flagship events organized in the country that holds the EU Presidency, together with DG RTD. It was a fantastic experience to prepare a concept, to write a successful Horizon proposal and to manage the governance of the event in a multi-stakeholder environment. 

In the recent years, I got more and more involved in the management of different networks we are members of. EURADA, by far, is one with a significant importance for me and for my agency. Step by step, from a rather passive position, we started to take more responsibility and roles within the network and to be more present and, I like to believe, we have developed a capacity to understand the position of EURADA members, to represent our interests, to build up events and to co-organize them – for example the Summer School, and to represent EURADA in Mirror Groups, Communities of Practitioners and to advocate for the regions and our development vision.