Biography

I am a political scientist with an interest in EU politics, policymaking and interest groups. Before joining the EUI, I was a Fulbright Schuman Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hosted by Professor Frank Baumgartner during the 2012-2013 academic year.
I completed my PhD at Trinity College Dublin in September 2012 with a dissertation on EU lobbying, ‘Lobbying Brussels: Interest Groups' Demands and Networks in EU Environmental Policy’, under the supervision of Professors Robert Thomson and Gail McElroy.

In my research I examine interest groups’ participation in environmental policymaking in the EU, and I investigate key aspects of EU interest groups’ lobbying behaviour such as the articulation of policy preferences, the formation of lobbying coalitions and the attainment of policy demands. My research also evaluates the EU interest intermediation system from the perspective of the plurality of interests represented and articulated demands, and it analyses the structuring of interest groups’ inter-organisational networks. As part of my Fulbright Fellowship, I conducted a systematic analytical review of the current scholarship on the topic of EU lobbying and interest groups. Based on an original dataset, my research provides a quantitative investigation of the theories, research designs and bibliographical sources employed currently in the scholarship on EU interest representation.

During my Max Weber Fellowship I intend to develop a comparative analysis of private actors’ participation, interest representation and demand attainment in EU policymaking across several policy areas and decision-making stages.

I was a teaching assistant and invited lecturer for courses on research design, EU lobbying, development and democracy and introduction to political science in both Ireland and the US.