Dr. Maria Ivanova is a Senior Policy Advisor and was a Partner of Ecologic Institute Berlin. Her work focuses on global environmental governance, the performance of international organisations, in particular the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the role of the United States in international environmental affairs. In addition, she works on campus sustainability and appropriate governance arrangements at higher education institutions. Dr. Maria Ivanova is a native Bulgarian speaker, speaks fluent English, Russian and Swedish and has basic knowledge of French.
Since 2010 Dr. Maria Ivanova has been Associate Professor at the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston). She also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability and as Director of the Global Environmental Governance Project at UMass Boston. Since 2013 she has been a member of the U.N. Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Maria Ivanova is the recipient of the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and is a faculty associate in the Governance, Environment and Markets (GEM) Initiative at Yale University as well as a Board member of the UN University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS). Previous to her engagement at UMass, she was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. From 2005 to 2009, Dr. Maria Ivanova was Assistant Professor of Government and Environmental Policy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and since 1997, she has been serving as Director of the Global Environmental Governance Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, a project she initiated. She has also worked at the Environment Directorate of the OECD and the Swedish Environment Protection Agency.
Dr. Maria Ivanova has published extensively on global environmental governance and is frequently invited to speak at scientific conferences around the world.
Dr. Maria Ivanova holds a PhD and two Master’s degrees (in International Relations and Environmental Policy) from Yale University and a Bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College.