1.  Francesco Mazzaferro

Head of the European Systemic Risk Board Secretariat

Francesco Mazzaferro has been the Head of the Secretariat of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) since January 2011. Prior to that, he was the Project Manager of the ESRB Preparatory Secretariat, which started work in March 2010.

He began his career in financial research in the Research Department of the Istituto Bancario San Paolo di Torino (today part of Intesa Sanpaolo) in Turin, Italy, in 1987. He joined the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, in 1992, starting his international career in the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, where his work focused on the European Currency Unit and preparations for the introduction of the single currency. In 1995 Mazzaferro joined the European Monetary Institute – which later became the European Central Bank – in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as the Officer of Policy Planning. In 1998 he became the Senior European Relations Officer in the European Relations Division. From 2000 he worked as Principal in the EU Neighbouring Regions Division, becoming the Head of Division in 2003.

Mazzaferro studied law at the University of Bologna and wrote his Master’s thesis on “EU law and legal aspects of the euro”.

Mazzaferro has been working in the field of European monetary policy for almost 20 years.

2.  Gaby Umbach

 
Gaby Umbach is Visiting Fellow and Director of GlobalStat at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute in Florence, which she joined in 2010 as a Jean Monnet Fellow before becoming RSC Research Fellow in 2011. At the EUI, she also collaborates with the institute’s School of Transnational Governance, where she leads the new STG InnoHub, analysing Public Policy Innovation and Outcomes and contributing to executive training on evidence-based policy-making.

She is Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Cologne and Innsbruck and member of the Strategy and Coordination Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service in Brussels responsible for research methodologies and strategic academic outreach. Since 2015, she serves as Book Review Editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies.

She holds a PhD in Political Science from Cologne University, where she was Senior Research Associate from 2000 to 2014. In 2009, she received the Stiftung Demokratie Best PhD Thesis Award for outstanding research on democratic decision-making within the EU’s supranational polity. Her current research focuses on evidence-based policy-making, measuring as governance technique, global governance by indicators and sustainable development.

Among her most recent publications is the ‘Palgrave Handbook on Indicators in Global Governance’ (co-edited with D.V. Malito and N. Bhuta; 2018). Prior to joining the EUI in 2010, she conducted research on EU integration studies; Europeanisation; multilevel and new modes of governance; policy co-ordination; environmental, employment and socio-economic policies; economic governance and cohesion policy; EU constitutionalisation; EU enlargement; and curriculum development in EU studies.