I am part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, which I joined in 2010 as a Jean Monnet Fellow. At the Robert Schuman Centre, I lead the Global Governance Programme’s research area on ‘Knowledge, Governance, Transformations’ and am Founding Director of GlobalStat.

I am an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, non-resident Visiting Fellow of the European Parliamentary Research Service, Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Innsbruck and LUISS Guido Carli/CIFE and Visiting External Examiner at the Department for Policy, Politics & Governance of the University of Malta. I am the Principal of the EUI’s Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on Expert Knowledge and Authority in Transformative Times, an academic advisor and author of the Enlightenment 2.0 programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, involved in the ESPAS Futurium Expert Group on Horizon Scanning, and a member of the Egmont Foresight Network.

Since 2022, I am Associate Editor of Cambridge University Press’ Journal ‘Data & Policy’ and Area Advisor for ‘Policy and Literacy for Data’ of the Data for Policy Community. From 2017 to 2018, I worked for the Strategy and Coordination Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service, being responsible for quantitative methodologies, academic outreach and relations to academia. From 2015 to 2022, I was Book Review Editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies, and, from 2019 to 2026, Editorial Board member of the International Journal Evaluation and Program Planning as well as Academic Advisor and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for European Politics in Berlin since 2020 whose Board member I was from 2019 to 2024.

My research focuses on the interaction between knowledge, evidence, data, and governance. I analyse how governance by and of knowledge influence transformations of politics and policies. This includes the analysis of measuring and the use of statistics as governance technique; data-based governance; data and evidence literacy in policy-making; evidence-informed policy-making; multilevel and anticipatory governance: socio-economic as well as eco-social policies: and sustainable development.

I hold a PhD with distinction summa cum laude in Political Science from Cologne University, where I was Senior Research Associate of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science and the Chair for Social Policy and Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences from 2000 to 2014. In 2009, I received the Stiftung Demokratie Best PhD Thesis Award for outstanding research on democratic decision-making within the EU’s supranational polity for my PhD thesis on the „Intent and Reality of a New Mode of Governance: ‘Get together’ or ‘Mind the Gap’? - The Impact of the European Employment Strategy on the Europeanisation of National Employment Policy Co-ordination and Policies in the United Kingdom and Germany” (published as Umbach, Gaby (2009): Intent and Reality of the European Employment Strategy. Europeanisation of National Employment Policies and Policy-Making?, Baden-Baden).

Prior to joining the EUI in 2010, I conducted research on EU integration studies; Europeanisation; multilevel and new modes of governance; policy co-ordination; environmental, employment and socio-economic policies; economic governance and cohesion policy; EU constitutionalisation; EU enlargement; and curriculum development in EU studies. Since 2010, I work on the analysis of measuring and the use of statistics as governance technique; data-based governance; data and evidence literacy in policy-making; evidence-informed policy-making; multilevel and anticipatory governance; socio-economic as well as eco-social policies; and sustainable development.

At the EUI, I designed and implemented GlobalStat, a multisource – ‘beyond GDP’ database on developments in a globalised world, of which I am the Founding Director and for which I institutionalised contacts with the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and OECD to link GlobalStat directly to politics. I also directed and co-directed research projects on measurement as a governance technique to inform evidence-informed policy-making (‘Global Governance by Indicators‘, ‘On the Political Economy of Measuring State Capacity and Governance‘, FEMETRICS, WE BE). I enhanced my expertise through my one-year practice as member of the EUI’s Ethics Committee (2015-16) and my work as policy analyst at the EPRS where I was responsible for research methodologies and strategic liaison to academia (2017-18), further developing the EP’s Statistics Warehouse and developing the EP’s Visiting Fellow and Scholar Programme. In this position, I responded to the practical demand for evidence-informed policy-making in EU politics and developed institutional strategies to meet this demand, including for training approaches for policy analysts and staff.

Over the past 25 years, a multitude of international collaborations enabled me to establish a wide cooperation network within academia and EU politics across and beyond the EU, which made me particularly interested in aspects of global governance, multilevel policy-making, data-based governance, data for policy-making and evidence-informed policy-making.