Cornelia Woll

Cornelia Woll is professor of political science, co-director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center (MaxPo) and a researcher at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences Po. She is the elected chair of Sciences Po's Academic Board. As of March 2022, she will take over the role of President and Academic Director of the Hertie School. Previously, she has served as Vice President for Studies and Academic Affairs (2015-18), founding co-director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policy (2011-14) and as Associate Dean for Research (2008-12) of Sciences Po. She held the Alfred-Grosser Visiting Chair at the Goethe University Frankfurt in 2018. During 2011/12, she was on leave at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Before joining Sciences Po in 2006, she worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She holds a habilitation in political science from the University of Bremen (2013), a bi-national Ph.D. from Sciences Po and the University of Cologne (2005), and a MA and a BA in international relations and political science from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation was awarded the Lipset Prize of the Society for Comparative Research and an Otto-Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. In 2005, she was the laureate of the Akademiestipendium of the Berlin Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Her research focuses on the international political economy and economic sociology, in particular regulatory issues in the European Union and the United States. A specialist on business-government relations, she is the author of The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparative Perspective (Cornell, 2014) and Firm Interest: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade (Cornell, 2008) and continues to investigate the politics of the recent financial crisis. Other work has examined economic patriotism, trade and industrial policies, Europeanization and employers' organizations.