I study how great power competition shapes European integration. My current research develops a framework distinguishing different strategies that the United States, China, and Russia use to influence the EU, such as binding (creating structural dependencies), compellence (coercion under time pressure) or subversion (undermining legitimacy). I trace how these strategies interact with domestic political cleavages to produce integration, fragmentation, or stasis across policy domains in the European Union. A second strand of my work examines the domestic politics of foreign and security policy, focused on how governments build consensus for international commitments and why states vary in transparency about military aid. Methodologically, I specialize in qualitative and mixed methods, particularly qualitative Bayesian reasoning and process tracing.

I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at ETH Zurich’s Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences. At ETH, I teach graduate courses on research design and qualitative methods and undergraduate courses on contemporary European politics. I received my PhD from the European University Institute in 2024, and previously held visiting or adjunct positions at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, the Centre for International Security at Hertie School, Syracuse University in Florence, University of Lucerne, Johns Hopkins SAIS Bologna, Central European University, George Washington University, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.

My work appears in the Journal of European Public Policy and Foreign Policy Analysis, with articles under review at the European Journal of Political Research and elsewhere. I am completing a book manuscript, Forging Consensus: The Domestic Politics of Foreign and Security Policy, and two co-authored volumes for Cambridge and Oxford University Press.

Beyond academia, I serve on the Advisory Board of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and co-founded the Quartet Institute, a Bucharest-based think tank. I comment on European and Romanian foreign policy in outlets including the Washington Post, Politico Europe, and AFP, and I serve on the Academic Advisory Board of the EUI’s EU Security Initiative.