Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (; born March 12, 1964) is a Romanian political scientist, academic, journalist and writer. A commentator on national politics, she is one of the civil society activists in post-1989 Romania, and, since 1990, an active contributor to Revista 22 weekly. Mungiu-Pippidi was a professor at the National School of Administration and Political Science in Bucharest, where she held courses on nationalism and electoral behavior. She has also lectured on post-Cold War transition to a market economy at several universities and business schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, and the Stockholm School of Economics. She is the sister of film director Cristian Mungiu. In August 2007 she assumed a professorship in democracy studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. She founded and currently chairs the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building and co-directs the EU FP7 five years research project ANTICORRP. In 2022 her work surpassed 5000 citations on Google Scholar, more than any other Romanian political scientist. Biography Born in Iași, she graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Iași. Starting in her student years, she began contributing essays of literary criticism to the magazine Cronica. After 1993, she worked for the Bucharest daily Express (until 1994). She was also the Romanian correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde (1992–1993), and was employed as a news editor by the Romanian Television Company (1997–1998). In 2000, she authored a political science textbook for optional studies in high schools. Mungiu-Pippidi holds a doctorate in social psychology. She visited Harvard University twice, first as a Fulbright fellow in the Government Department (1994–1995), and then as Shorenstein fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (1998–1999). In 1995, she founded Romania's largest think tank, the Romanian Academic Society (SAR), which issued several reports that were at the center of public debates (among others, they were credited with promoting steps that led the Parliament to ultimately adopt legislation regarding freedom of information, flat taxation, and other approaches to Romania's accession to the European Union). Mungiu-Pippidi is currently the SAR's president. She has also created and led the "Coalition for a Clean Parliament" (Coaliția pentru un Parlament Curat), which in the wake of the 2004 legislative elections, campaigned for candidates with reported moral problems (such as incompatibility or undergoing the investigation of judicial authorities) to be excluded from party lists (98 candidatures were withdrawn following the