CEDI also welcomes visiting fellows with expertise on the topics of CEDI. CEDI Research Fellows participate in or co-organise CEDI events, publish in the Working Paper Series and present their work in our blog.

Our current research fellows are:

Mehman Ahmadov is a CEDI Fellow and PhD student at the Department of Political Science, TU Darmstadt. He obtained his bachelor degree from Qafqaz University, Azerbaijan, which focused on Public Administration and his master degree from Istanbul University, Turkey, at the department of Political Science and Public Administration. He has research expertise on Public Administration, Comparative Public Administration, Good Governance, European Studies, especially on European Integration, foreign policy of EU towards neighboring countries, European Neighbourhood Policy and Eastern Partnership, EU’s promotion of good governance etc. He mainly analyzes the role of European Union in the South Caucasus (especially Azerbaijan) in terms of Good Governance. He is currently doing research on “EU’s Promotion of Good Governance within the framework of ENP and EaP” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Michele Knodt. Mr. Ahmadov works at Qafqaz University Azerbaijan as a research assistant since 2013.

Vladimir Paramonov is founder and director of the analytical group / project “Central Eurasia”, www.ceasia.org, www.ceasia.ru (since June 2010), Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is experienced in the area of policy oriented and interdisciplinary analysis. Mr. Paramonov obtained a Ph.D. in Political Science / International Relations in 2003 from the University of World Economy and Diplomacy under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Formerly Dr. Paramonov worked as a Senior Researcher (Research Coordinator) at the Center for Economic Research under the State Adviser (of the President) on Social-Economic Policy (2004-2006), the head of the Center for Systemic Research (2002-2003), and the part-time/full-time researcher, later head of the Department “The US and Europe” of the Institute for Regional and Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan (1996-2001).

He worked with Uzbek, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, European, US and Chinese governmental bodies as well as with some internationally recognized universities, institutions, donors and think-tanks such as UNDP, ADB, OSCE, LSE, USAID, OSI, NUPI, Oxford University, IISS, LSE, Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation, Academy of Defense of the UK, Carnegie Endowment, several European and American consulting companies and NGOs, leading Russian, Chinese and Central Asian think-tanks/research institutions, etc.

Eloísa del Pino is a CEDI Fellow and guest reseacher at the Institute of Political Science at TU Darmstadt in July 2016. She specialises in welfare state reforms, citizens attitudes and public administration and is currently working on the changing welfare governance in the wake of the economic crisis in Europe.

Carlos Henrique Santana is a fellow at the Humboldt Foundation and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, TU Darmstadt. He has research expertise on comparative political economy, especially on industrial policy, financial systems, state-owned public banks, and energy policy. His main works have focused on South America, relations between South America and Central-Eastern Europe, and BRIC countries. His analyses have privileged historical and constructivist approaches. He obtained his PhD in Political Science at Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IESP-UERJ), spent a year as visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, and since then worked with a large interdisciplinary network called Brazilian National Institute of Science and Technology (INCT-PPED). With his colleagues from the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) he also was engaged in comparative analysis of state capacity in BRIC countries. In addition, he is trying to articulate analyzes about EU external energy and resource policy. Currently, Dr. Santana is developing a comparative analysis of energy infrastructure policies adopted by Brazil, Russia, India and China in the last twenty years. The project analyzes three aspects: the federative dilemmas in coordinating policies, public financing instruments in long-term credit, and bureaucratic cohesion as the mainstay of policy implementation.

Dr. Tamer Söyler is a CEDI fellow at TU Darmstadt and a researcher at Fluminense Federal University in Brazil. He obtained his PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin in Sociology during which he was part of international research projects focusing on social inequality in India and Brazil. Dr. Söyler’s main research interest is the rise of the Global South with its internal and external dimensions. While during his doctoral studies he primarily focused on the epistemological consequences of this grand-scale social transformation, his postdoctoral research extends the philosophical and sociological investigation to the political field. His research focuses on the topics of social inequalities and social movements while connecting these inquires to the fields of development cooperation and poverty reduction. Within the framework of CEDI, Dr. Söyler examines what kinds of challenges the epistemological shift has brought to the EU and probes into the social, political and economic consequences of the rise of the Global South for the EU’s external policy making.

PD Dr. Claudia Wiesner is currently senior researcher in the project “Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the European Polity” (TRACE), funded by the Academy of Finland, and senior guest researcher at TU Darmstadt. Until Sept. 2015, she was Acting Professor for Comparative Politics at Philipps-University, Marburg and Ruhr University, Bochum, as well as Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Finnish Research Centre in Political Thought and Conceptual Change at Jyväskylä University. Her main research interests lie in the comparative study of democracy, political culture and political sociology in the EU multilevel system. She especially focuses on changes of concepts and institutions, as well as on the related debates and discourses. Claudia Wiesner’s second field of research is Public Policy, its evaluation, its reform and its theory. Here she has a long-standing experience in public policy consulting. She chairs the ECPR Standing Group “Political Concepts”, has led several research projects and international cooperation networks, and was visiting fellow at universities in the US, France, Finland, Greece, and Spain.