Anna Maria Mayda is Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, where she is also a (tenured) Professor of Economics since 2003, with a joint appointment in the Economics Department and School of Foreign Service. She studied statistics and economics at University of Rome La Sapienza, and received a Master and PhD in Economics at Harvard University. She was a visiting scholar in several policy institutions including the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC, CEPII in Paris, EIEF in Rome, etc. More recently she was Senior Economist and Senior Adviser in the Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. State Department. In this role, she worked on issues related to U.S. immigration policy and trade policy. She is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), IZA-LISER and CReAM. Her research mainly focuses on issues of immigration, trade and political economy and has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, the European Economic Review, etc. She has also been awarded two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.