Dr. Michael Rupp is Head of Sector regarding Connectivity and the Green Deal in the European Commission. From 2015 to 2018 he was Head of Section for – amongst others – migration, border management and justice reform in the EU Delegation in Turkey.

Michael started his career as an academic researching at his Alma Mater – the University of Heidelberg – and later teaching EU politics at the Universities of Kingston upon Hull and Leeds in the UK. There he completed his Doctoral thesis on the EU accession process of the Visegrad countries. He switched to the European Commission in Brussels endeavouring to implement his research by helping Slovakia and Hungary to join the European Union. He was recruited by the European Parliament as enlargement coordinator in the foreign affairs committee secretariat and helped guide reports and resolutions through the EP until the first big accession was finished in 2004. Thereafter he helped build up the new Subcommittee on Human Rights in the European Parliament. Always interested in new challenges he switched to the Cabinet of the Slovak Commissioner Ján Figel’ and later Maroš Šefčovič to get a bird’s eye view of Commission politics from the Berlaymont. In his last posting 2015-2018 he was Head of Section in the EU Delegation in Ankara responsible for numerous difficult files including border management and the migration crisis. He is now responsible for Connectivity and Green Deal policies for the regional programmes in the Eastern Partnership.

He is also Senior Associate Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).