Amanda Sloat (USA)
Research Fellow, Queen's University Belfast, UK; Research Project: "Enlargement, Gender Governance: The Civic and Political Participation of Women in Central and Eastern European Candidate Countries"

Amanda Sloat earned a BA in Political Theory from James Madison College at Michigan State University in 1997 and a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. Her doctoral dissertation, which examined the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and its relationship with the European Union, was published as Scotland in Europe: A Study of Multi-Level Governance (Peter Lang, 2002).

Following the completion of her PhD Amanda was a stagiaire in the European Commission, where she assisted the Secretariat General team with the preparation of the "White Paper on European Governance." She served as a specialist advisor to the Scottish Parliament's European Committee during its governance inquiry and to the Northern Ireland Assembly's Committee for Finance and Personnel during an inquiry into European structural funding. She began a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research at Queen's University Belfast in September 2001. After successfully applying for 1. 2 million euros in European Union Framework Five research funding, Amanda became the academic co-ordinator of a 3-year, 12-country research project that is examining the political participation of women in 10 Central and Eastern European countries. She has been a visiting research fellow at the Academy of the Sciences-Czech Republic and the United Nation's Research Institute for Social Development.

During her Jean Monnet fellowship, Amanda will continue to oversee the EU research project and draft a comparative report on the implementation of EU equality legislation in the new EU member states.