Cristina Blanco Sío-López is a ‘María Zambrano’ Senior Distinguished Researcher hired under the Spanish government’s international Talent Attraction programme, which is funded by NextGenerationEU. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the NGEU ‘FUNDEU’ project, which received €147,500 of funding from NextGenerationEU. Her main line of research at the ESOMI is entitled ‘The Historical Legacies of Human Mobility Rights: Free Circulation and Migration Policies in the EU’.

She was awarded the Research Excellence ‘I3 Certificate’ and obtained the ‘Research Consolidation’ 2022 from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. As such, she is also currently the PI of the FREEMOVEU project ‘Rediscovering Empowering Historical Legacies on the EU’s Free Movement of Persons’ at the UDC, funded by the Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) with a budget of €125,240. She has been selected as Visiting Fellow of the University of Cambridge in Social Sciences and Humanities during the 2024-2025 academic year.

In 2024 she was the Expert Peer-reviewer in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences of the Evidence Review Report of the European Commission ‘The successful and timely uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the EU’. In 2023 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) in London in recognition of her contributions to research in the field of the History of the European integration process. Since 2022, he has been YASAS Standing Delegate representing the Young Academy of Spain (AJdE) for the EU SAPEA + project on ‘Science Advice for Policy by European Academies’.

Since 2019, she has been PI for the EU Horizon 2020 project ‘NAVSCHEN’ – EC GA no.: 841201 – where she coordinates a budget of €251,002.56: https://www.unive.it/pag/38078/

From 2019 to 2022, Cristina was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Senior Global Fellow at the European Studies Center (ESC) – Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia. Prior to this, she was Assistant Professor in European Culture and Politics at the University of Groningen, where she taught and conducted research in English, French and Spanish, and a ‘Santander’ Senior Fellow in Iberian and European Studies at the European Studies Centre (ESC) at St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where she remains a Senior Member.

Cristina was an Executive Committee Member of the Global Young Academy (GYA), where she is co-principal investigator (Co-PI) 0f the GYA North-South project ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic and Art’, and a member of the team for the GYA (Sasha Kagansky) research project ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Personal Experiences of Global Young Researchers’. She is also a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) and a Full Member of the Academia Joven de España (AJdE). She served as Chair of the North America Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) and is a R4 Research Associate at the Association for Global Political Thought at Harvard University, a R4 Research Associate at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab Expert and a United Nations Network on Migration Expert. She was also an Expert and Evaluator for the Research Executive Agency (REA) (Contract no. CT-EX2014D197488-101) and for the EU Horizon 2020 COST programme.

Cristina was Invited Lecturer 2021 at the University of Vienna; Invited Lecturer 2020 at the University of Florida; IMSISS-CES Senior Visiting Scholar Fellow at the University of Glasgow; and Invited Lecturer 2019 at OCESH – St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford and at the ‘Law, Justice and Society’ programme at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She was also Senior Lecturer 2018 for JRC at the IIASA in Austria; Scholar in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh; and Invited Expert 2017 at Shanghai University – 上海大学. She has previously worked as a Director of predoctoral and postdoctoral research teams, MA Lecturer and PI in European Studies (FNR ‘Spain’ project: €1 million; EU Erasmus + ‘Borders’ project: €660,000, etc.) at the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe at the Université du Luxembourg; as Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) in Florence; and as a R3 Researcher for the European Parliament.

She was awarded a PhD in History and Civilization (Area: European Integration History) by the European University Institute (EUI) and received the ‘Helmut Kohl – Carlos V’ Best PhD Thesis Award in ‘European Research and Mobility’ from the EAYF in 2008.

Cristina is an Editorial Board Member for the Rights and Science journal (R&S), ISSN: 2531-1352, and has made more than 200 contributions to high-impact journals and international conferences in different languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.), which can be viewed here. Her research and publications focus on European Studies and European Integration History —with an accent on EU enlargement policy temporalities and the Schengen Area fundamental rights— Global Governance, Comparative Regional Integration and Digital Humanities.