Prof. Dr. Margarita M. Balmaceda
Senior Fellow
© priv.
- margarita [dot] balmaceda [at] rifs-potsdam [dot] de
Margarita Balmaceda was born in Argentina, and grew up there and in Puerto Rico. Her life changed course at age sixteen when, after a three-day bus trip across the United States, she started studying Russian at UC Berkeley, later complemented by intensive training in Ukrainian, Hungarian, and German. After studying the connection between science policy and foreign policy in the USSR for her PhD in Politics from Princeton University, a Ford Foundation-funded Post-doctoral year at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute helped ground her research in Ukrainian Studies, her core academic community to this day.
Seeking an alternative to what she saw as simplistic Moscow-centered analyses and seeking to study energy and resource politics from the perspective of local stakeholders, she has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and Hungary. Her research path took a new turn in 2022 when Russia's war on Ukraine thwarted a planned Fulbright research stay there and she was allowed to transfer to RIFS, where a steep learning curve and the opportunity to retool her Ukraine expertise to bear on important sustainability conversations make her say "carpe diem!" every day of her new RIFS stay starting in June 2024.