The Université de Montréal General Conference Local Organising Committee

Head of Project

Catherine Villemer, Executive Director, European Union Centre of Excellence, Université de Montréal.

Catherine  Villemer is an  agro-economist  (AgroCampus,  Rennes,  1996) and  worked  abroad (Belgium, Germany, Vietnam) in the field of secondary and higher education, economics, and environmental policies in Europe. She was in charge of the development and the transfer of research at the Jean-Monnet Chair after 2007, including editor and publisher of the monthly Québec@europe e-letter. She has acted as Executive Director of the Centre since 2012 and as Senior Advisor for Public Relations and Partnerships at the Montreal Centre for international Studies since 2013.

André Blais is Professor in the Political Science Department at the Université de Montréal.

He is the leader of the Making Electoral Democray Work Project and the chair of the Planning Committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Research Fellow with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC), the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative (CIREQ), and the Center for Interuniversity Research Analysis on Organizations (CIRANO). He is past President of the Canadian Political Science Association. His research interests are elections, electoral systems, turnout, public opinion, and methodology.

Éric Montpetit is Professor in the Political Science Department at the Université de Montréal.

In 2008, he was a guest professor at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve. He completed a PhD in comparative and Canadian public policy at McMaster University in 1999. His current research centres on policy in Europe and North America within domains requiring scientific knowledge (notably biotechnology); on the role of experts in these domains; on policy learning and, more generally, on disagreements generated by the making of policy choices. His past research includes environmental policy comparisons. He has received research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). In 2006, his book, Misplaced Distrust, won the American Political Science Association’s Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize for the best book on environmental politics and policy.

Frédéric Mérand is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal.

He was Visiting Professor of European Studies at LUISS University in Rome. Director of the Université de Montréal Centre for International Studies (CÉRIUM) and Director of the European Union Centre of Excellence. A former policy advisor in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, he has been published in West European Politics, Security Studies, the Journal of Common Market Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, International Journal, European Security, and Comparative European Politics. He has published four books on European security, defence policy and the European Union. His current work, with Martial Foucault, deals with social representations of burden sharing in international security organisations such as the EU, NATO, the OSCE and the UN.

Christine Rothmayr Allison is Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the Université de Montréal.

A graduate of the University of Zurich, before joining the University of Montreal, she taught at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her two main fields of interest are: comparative public policy, focusing on the fields of biotechnology and biomedicine. and courts and politics, in particular, the impact of court decisions on public policy making in North-America and Europe. Her current projects include “Comparative Policy Agendas: the Supreme Court of Canada”. Her latest book (edited with Isabelle Engeli) addresses methodological challenges in comparative policy studies (Palgrave 2014). She has published articles in the European Journal of Political Research, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, Journal of European Public Policy and Regulation & Governance.