The IEE-ULB authorities
A political scientist and a lawyer have been elected to lead the IEE-ULB during the 2023-2024 & the 2024-2025 periods.
On May 15th, 2023 the Council of the Institute for European Studies of the ULB held its 42nd session since its 2014-2015 reform to, among other activities, elect its authorities.
Professor François Foret was elected President and Professor Chloé Brière, Director. This team has the suppport of a Research Logistic Coodinator and of a Administrative & Communication Director.
Consolidation and deepening
François Foret and Chloé Brière manifested their commitment to reaffirming the three missions of the IEE – teaching, research and public debate – “in a triple interdisciplinary, multidimensional and sustainable perspective”.
With interdisciplinarity as the IEE’s flagship, the new authorities aim to “encourage intellectual curiosity and imagination conducive to new collaborations that are the only way to grasp the complexity of protean issues such as digital technology, the climate challenge, new forms of inequality, discrimination and identities, and changes in governance”.
For the new team, the development of the IEE is anchored in different dimensions that link it to Brussels, Belgium and Europe in its relations with the rest of the world.
The authorities of the IEE-ULB
PRESIDENT | François Foret is Professor of political science at the Cevipol-Institute for European Studies, Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is also fellow at the European Governance and Politics Programme, Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute Florence. His specialization is in political sociology; European studies and comparative politics. His researches focus on the legitimization of political orders; symbolic politics; the interaction between politics, culture, religion and values; the comparison between Europe, Japan and the US.
DIRECTOR | Chloé Brière is professor of EU law at the Centre for European Law and an affiliated member of the IEE (Université libre de Bruxelles). Since 2019, she has been holding the chair in European law, teaching, researching and supervising students in the Faculty of Law and Criminology. Her research has focused on the European legal framework in relation to the fight against Trafficking in Human Beings and its promotion outside the European Union’s borders. Her interests include other aspects of European Union Law, such as EU Criminal Law, EU external relations law, EU migration law and the free movement of persons.
RESEARCH LOGISTIC COORDINATOR | Marta Matrakova is the IEE’s research logistic collaborator since September 2022. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a Master’s degree in International Cooperation from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a Master’s degree in International Relations and EU Diplomatic Studies from the College of Europe. In 2020 she obtained her PhD in Political Science under the joint supervision of the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) “Guido Carli” in the framework of the GEM-STONES programme funded by the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions and managed by the Institut d’études européennes of the ULB. Her research focuses on democratic reform processes in post-Soviet countries (Armenia, Georgia and Moldova) and the international influence of the European Union and Russia.
EXECUTIVE MANAGER & COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR | María Isabel Soldevila Brea is a journalist. She is the Executive Manager & Communication Director at the IEE-ULB since 2017. She holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, (2004) that she attended with a Fulbright grant. She was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2015). Soldevila Brea was for a decade the Unesco chair of Communication, Democracy and Governance in her native Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she was also Editor-in-Chief of the country’s largest national newspaper and anchor of a daily TV magazine on political and current affairs. Her work as a journalist has focussed on gender, migration, human rights and politics. She completed the IEE-ULB’s Executive Master in European Union Studies and is now taking her fist steps in research at the IEE-ULB looking at the communication strategy of the European Commission.