I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research based at the University of Glasgow. My research interests lie at the intersection between various social sciences, from sociology, social psychology, and social statistics to comparative environmental politics, political economy and law, with a particular focus on topics related to political methodology, environmental governance, green cities, sustainable development, inequalities, democracy and democratization.

I previously held positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Manchester and the University of Essex. At the University of Sydney I was involved in a project addressing new forms of inequality and I also coordinated and taught postgraduate courses in Quantitative Methods. At the University of Manchester I was a Lecturer in Social Statistics, teaching Research Methodology courses within the Department of Social Statistics. At the University of Essex I was part of the Methods Research Group within The Institute for Social and Economic Research. Specifically, I was involved in calculating weighting factors that account for unequal selection probability and/or align the survey sample to the general population for two UK longitudinal large-scale household surveys: the main Understanding Society (UKHLS) survey and the Innovation Panel (in 2017). I was also directly involved in developing the syntax and generating survey weighting factors for 23 European survey samples corresponding to the 23 participating countries in Round 8 of the European Social Survey (in 2018).

I did my MSc and PhD in Comparative Environmental Politics, the Advanced Quantitative Methods Pathway, at the University of Southampton. My postgraduate research was fully-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK (ESRC) and consisted of a series of cross-country longitudinal analyses regarding Europeans’ commitment to protecting the environment. The thesis empirically operationalized the ecological citizenship by taking into account individual-level factors as well as country-level factors related to environmental governance, economic development, and quality of democracy.

Prior to my postgraduate studies, I was a Researcher at the Romanian Youth Research Centre, conducting and coordinating primary country-scale research on various topics related to young people’s lives, both qualitative and quantitative. Within this institute, I was constantly involved in the methodological coordination of one of the iconic Romanian survey projects that emerged in the early years of democracy, in Romania, namely the Romanian Youth Barometer. My research focus was however on how democratic citizenship could be understood by the Romanian young people of those newly democratic times; how their local, regional, national, and European identity has been built on such meaning and practiced in their daily life.

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