Dr Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi has been appointed to the Endowed Chair at the Faculty of Law. She is one of the nine top academics to be financed by the Board of the University via the Endowed Chair Programme. In addition to the professorship, this chair enables the appointment of a number of PhD students and postdoc researchers, who will be supervised by the professor.
Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi (Italy, 1970) holds two PhDs, having gained the first at the universities of Trieste and Bergamo in 1998 and the second (summa cum laude) at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg in 2004. She has been Senior Researcher at the Law Faculty of the University of Bremen and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Law at the Hanse Law School in Bremen since 2007. In addition, she is Fellow at the Centre of European Law and Politics (ZERP) of the University of Bremen.
Colombi Ciacchi is a prominent researcher in the field of European law of obligations. In recent years, she has focused in particular on an interdisciplinary approach of the horizontal operation of fundamental rights and social justice in contract law. She is widely renowned for her expertise in the field of internal and external comparative law. Colombi Ciacchi has worked in many international partnerships and research projects, which has resulted in an extensive international network.
She has set up (or helped to set up) various large-scale EU-funded projects, including the Transfer of Knowledge project ‘Protection from Unfair Suretyships in the European Union’, within the framework of which she worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Law of the University of Oxford.
Groningen Centre for Law and Governance
Colombi Ciacchi will be Academic Director of the Groningen Centre for Law and Governance (GCL), holding the Law and Governance chair. Established in 2009, the GCL conducts legal research concerning the relationship between public and private interests. Colombi Ciacchi’s research dovetails perfectly with this theme. Her international perspective will help shape the Centre’s research.
Prof. Leon Verstappen, former Dean of the Faculty of Law, has been appointed Academic Director of the GCL and will be particularly involved in shaping the cooperation with other Dutch institutions in the framework of the Netherlands Institute for Law and Governance.
Endowed Chairs programme
In order to expand its reputation as an excellent research institution, in 2009 the University of Groningen started an ambitious investment programme, the University of Groningen Endowed Chairs programme. This project is founded on an investment of approximately EUR 20 million, designed to attract internationally prominent academics to the University of Groningen. The fields these academics work in are divided over the nine faculties. Thus far, the following professors have been appointed to Endowed Chairs: Prof. Kocku von Stuckrad (Theology and Religious Studies), Prof. Philip McCann (Spatial Sciences), Prof. Igor Douven and Prof. Pauline Kleingeld (Philosophy) and Prof. Johan Bos (Arts).
