Tobias Mac-Lean

When I think back to the EI, it is not first and foremost academic excellence that I remember, but the particularly great graduating class. The internationality and diversity impressed me: despite the focus on Europe, the graduates were made up of nationalities from all over the world. The challenging year brought us together and even now I still regularly meet many former fellow students.

I never regretted coming to LSE. In the first week of my studies at the EI, Martin Schulz, former President of the European Parliament, gave the introductory lecture: the academic year could not have started any better.

The training at the EI complemented my German university education. The special focus on the comparison and evaluation of arguments, coupled with the teaching of the latest theories, has been particularly valuable in my professional life.  My first role after graduation was policy adviser in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs at the European Parliament; in this role, I was able to draw directly from the theoretical foundations of courses such as the Political Economy of European Monetary Integration and Interest Representation and Economic Policy-Making. During those exciting years in Brussels, I worked intensively on financial regulation and euro area governance.

I am now working as a Senior Policy Officer for the kENUP Foundation. The small but fast-growing foundation is a global promoter of research-based innovation with public and societal benefit. It supports European startups and SMEs in industries with substantive underlying market failures, for example in the development of medical interventions for the Global South. Earlier this year, and in cooperation with the European Investment Bank, we established the EU Malaria Fund. The fund aims to support the control and eradication of malaria by providing venture loans to scientifically promising projects not yet pursued by the pharmaceutical industry, thus helping to increase the deal-flow in the domain of tropical diseases. In addition, I am currently developing further investment platforms, such as a co-investment scheme in bio-convergence between Israel and the EU, and a new instrument to fight neurodegenerative diseases.

I strive to understand, improve, and shape policy and the EI is exactly the place to learn how to do it.