European University Institute (scientific coordinator)

The European University Institute was created in 1972 by the Member States of the founding European Communities. Its main objective is to provide advanced academic training to Ph.D students and to promote research at the highest level.
It is a major doctoral and postdoctoral academic institution and carries out research in a European perspective (fundamental research, comparative research and Community research) in history, law, economics, political and social science.
The EUI is a community of around 600 researchers and 50 professors. Its full-time teaching staff, fellows and research students are recruited from all countries of the European Union and from further afield. It welcomes research students for periods of one to four years who wish to study for the Institute’s doctorate (normally four years) or take the LL.M. (one year Masters programme) in comparative, European and international law, as well as post-doctoral fellows.
Its doctoral programme is among the most important in Europe in the field of social sciences; over 100 theses are defended every year.
Since the 1990s the Institute has developed a fellowship programme. Postdoctoral research is becoming an ever more important part of the EUI’s activities. From 2006 there are 40 postdoctoral fellows under a new scheme financed by the European Commission.
Other specific programmes and projects are funded through a variety of resources, private and public sponsors and mainly the European Community: the EUI is involved in research projects covering the various legal, political, social and economic dimensions of the Europeanization processes. Most of these projects are run in cooperation with European and non-European universities. The EUI is the coordinator of 2 STREPs and of 1 IP under the Framework 6 programme.
The Department of Law at the European University Institute can be described as being “European and international in its character, comparative in its approach and contextual in its methods”. The Department is a truly cosmopolitan centre of legal postgraduate education and research: a small faculty of nineteen, composed by professors of nine nationalities; the administrative staff of six consisting of persons from five countries, and the student body having over a hundred researchers from no fewer than twenty-two countries. The staff takes seriously the precept that legal scholarship is at its best when pursued in an interdisciplinary manner, in dialogue with, and using the tools borrowed from, other academic disciplines, thereby displaying sufficient sensitivity to the broader context – political, economic, cultural etc – in which legal phenomena take place.