Biography
Cristian is a Lecturer in Public Administration at the Business School of Edinburgh Napier University and a Senior Research Associate in the Unity Lab (Urban Innovation Policy Lab).
He holds a PhD in Political Science and European Studies from Loughborough University and is an Associate Researcher of the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
Prior to joining Edinburgh Napier, Cristian has worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Studio Europa of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, as a Researcher at the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Apart from his academic research, he has worked as an expert and consultant on more than twenty studies and consultancy projects commissioned by the European Parliament, European Commission, and other different national governments and international institutions. Before moving to the UK, Cristian worked for two years in Brussels (Belgium) and studied Political Science, International Relations and European Studies in Bucharest (Romania), Budapest (Hungary) and Maastricht (the Netherlands).
His research has been both problem driven and theoretical and has examined, so far, issues of public administrations and public policies (state and administrative capacity and political governance), regional and local development and the management and implementation of different public funding schemes across Europe (Cohesion and Structural Funds), and European Studies (East-West divisions / Central and Eastern Europe). His work has been or is pending publishing in different academic journals such as Regional Studies, Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP), Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), East European Politics, European Politics and Society, Regional Studies-Regional Science or the Romanian Journal of European Affairs.
Cristian's current research aims to make a contribution towards understanding and dealing with the effects of climate change and digital transformations, particularly with regard to:
(a) public sector governance and the implementation of urban sustainable transitions and their impact on urban and regional development;
(b) the role of capacity-building for net-zero and digital transitions, adaptation and mitigation of climate change and digital transformations across different levels of public administrations;
(c) the political and institutional implications of climate change (in)actions, policies and narratives (e.g. decarbonization/net-zero/digitalisation) both locally and across the globe.