New Faces at the WTI

WTI welcomes new doctoral students Karolis Gudas and Roberto Claros who entered the PhD programme in January, and Beatrice Nybert who arrived in February. Doris Oberdabernig will also be joining us later in the year.

Ilaria Espa, a post-doctoral student, arrived at the end of last year on a COFIT fellowship. You can read an interview with Ilaria here: http://www.wti.org/news-archive/cofit-was-a-great-discovery-for-me/

Ilaria and Karolis are both collaborating on NCCR Work Package 5: Trade and Climate Change. Karolis will work on the “Transit of Energy” project while Ilaria will lead her own project on “New Disciplines in Energy Related Export Restrictions”.

Beatrice Nybert will join Work Package 3: Innovation and Competitiveness in Trade Governance, looking into the history of intellectual property protection enforcement.

Doris Oberdabernig will be collaborating on Work Package 4: Trade and the Diffusion of Migration Policy, exploring intergenerational mobility in education and why it is different for immigrants than for natives of a particular country.

In faculty news WTI welcomes Joseph Francois who joins the University as professor of economics, specialising in international trade, investment and development. A native of Washington DC, Joseph comes to Bern from the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria.

Joseph will lead Cluster 2 of Work Package 5: “The Challenges of Mitigation and Adaptation”. He will also head a project on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Enforcement and Industry Competitiveness within Work Package 3 and contribute to a project in Work Package 6 (Impact Assessment in International Trade Regulation). He brings with him a team of two post-doctoral students and two PhD students – including Doris Oberdabernig - who will join Work Packages 3, 4 and 5.