Dr. Ilke Toygür is the Director of the Global Policy Center and Professor of European Politics at the School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs at IE University. In addition, she is a senior associate at the CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program in Washington DC and serves as an elected board member of the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) in Brussels. She joined the ECFR Council in April 2025.

Dr. Toygür began her career back in 2008, working at the Economic Development Foundation (IKV), a research institute focusing on the European Union. In 2016, she completed her PhD degree in Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her doctoral research focused on the impact of European integration on the vote and party system change in Western Europe in times of crises.

In 2015, she was granted a Mercator-IPC Fellowship at the Istanbul Policy Center. Following her PhD, she worked for the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid and for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Brussels. She has also been a lecturer at the University Carlos III of Madrid and a visiting researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), University of Mannheim, and Brookings Institution. In 2024, she has been selected as a Mercator Fellow in Germany.

Her main areas of expertise include European integration, elections and democracy in Western Europe, the geopolitics of Europe, and transatlantic relations. She holds a BA degree and an MA degree in Economics, an MA degree in Democracy and Government, and a PhD in Political Science. Her research and articles have so far appeared in Carnegie Europe, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Brookings Institution, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, and El País, among others.