I study how great-power competition shapes European polity-building. More precisely, my research asks how the return of power politics and the emergence of strong geopolitical rivals affect the development, distribution, and durability of political authority and policy capacity in the European Union. Situated in the literature on polity-building and institutional development, my work examines how the strategic behavior of other great powers interact with domestic political cleavages and inherited institutional arrangements to produce different trajectories of integration, fragmentation, differentiation, or institutional stasis across EU policy domains, particularly CFSP, CSDP, and economic security.

A connected strand of my work examines the domestic politics of foreign and security policy. I study how governments construct political consensus for international commitments, how domestic institutions shape foreign-policy choices, and why states vary in the transparency of their military assistance. This research identifies the domestic mechanisms through which geopolitical pressures are translated into institutional change, or resistance to change, at the European level. Methodologically, I specialize in qualitative and mixed-method research, particularly process tracing and qualitative Bayesian reasoning.

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

Beyond academia, I serve on the Advisory Board of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Strategic Reflection Group “Romania in the EU” of the President of Romania, and on the Academic Advisory Board of the European University Institute’s EU Security Initiative. I also co-founded the Quartet Institute, a Bucharest-based foreign-policy think tank. My commentary on European and Romanian foreign policy has appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Europe, and AFP.