Gaby Umbach

Dr. Gaby Umbach is a Professor at European University Institute.
Dr. Umbach was Senior Research Associate of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science and the Seminar for Social Policy from 2000 to 2014 from Cologne University.
In 2009, she received the Stiftung Demokratie Best PhD Thesis Award for outstanding research on democratic decision-making within the EU’s supranational polity.
Prior to joining the EUI in 2010, she conducted research on EU integration studies, Europeanization multilevel and new modes of governance, policy co-ordination, environmental, employment and socio-economic policies, economic governance and cohesion policy, EU constitutionalization, EU enlargement, and curriculum development in EU studies.
At the EUI, she designed and implemented GlobalStat, a multisource – ‘beyond GDP’ database on developments in a globalized world, of which she is the Founding Director and for which she institutionalized contacts with the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and OECD to link GlobalStat directly to politics.
Dr. Umbach also co-directed research projects on measurement as a governance technique to inform EBPM (‘Global Governance by Indicators‘ and ‘On the Political Economy of Measuring State Capacity and Governance‘).
She enhanced her expertise through her one-year practice as member of the EUI’s Ethics Committee (2015-16) and her work as policy analyst at the EPRS where she was responsible for research methodologies and strategic liaison to academia (2017-18).
In the latter position, she responded to the practical demand for EBPM in EU politics and developed institutional strategies to meet this demand, including for training approaches for policy analysts and staff.
She holds a PhD in Political Science from Cologne University.