Mihaela Papa

Mihaela Papa is Director of Research and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies. She was previously a Senior Fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts, where she led the Rising Power Alliances project and taught sustainable development and global governance, and she earlier worked at MIT Sloan and in the MIT Provost's Office.

Her expertise is negotiation strategy and coalition-building, with a focus on BRICS and rising powers in global governance and on climate transitions. She leads the BRICS Lab and has published on BRICS as a soft-balancing coalition, on its relations with the United States, and on its potential to de-dollarize finance. A postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Law School shaped her research on emerging economies, including fieldwork in India and at Fudan University in Shanghai.

She has advised the U.S. government, the European Commission and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and her commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Conversation, CNN, Bloomberg and the BBC. She began her career as a trade economist at the Croatian Foreign Ministry and holds an MA in Law and Diplomacy and a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School.