She earned her PhD in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, in 2010 for a dissertation entitled ‘Political Learning and the Number of Parties: Why Age Matters’, which won the UniCredit and Universities Foundation Best CEE PhD Thesis Award in May 2011. She received a Bachelor in Economics and a Master in Political Economy and Public Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to taking her post at Utrecht, Ekaterina Rashkova worked as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (2013-2016) and held a three year post-doctoral fellowship at Leiden University, the Netherlands (2010-2013) before that. During the 2015-2016 academic year she conducted research on the effect of electoral regulation on party competition as a EURIAS fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS).