Elena Sánchez Montijano is Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Science from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Master in International Cooperation and Development from the Granada University. She is lecturer at the Political Science Department of Barcelona University. Previously, she was an associate researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (GRITIM-UPF), adjunct professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 2010 and at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). Her main areas of interest are immigrant integration policies in Europe and the transnational relations of foreigners with their countries of origin. She is also an expert in methodology. Currently, she is the Scientific Coordinator of the SAHWA project (Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract) funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission and researcher at CEASAVAL project (topic: Asylum) and FEUTURE project (topic: EU-Turkey relations), both funded by Horizon2020 programme of the European Commission. Also she is co-director of the project Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX 2015), researcher at NIEM project, which analyse refugee policies, and country coordinator for Spain of the European Web Site on Integration (EWSI), all of them funded by the European Commission through public calls. At the national level she has directed the project “Discrimination in the Nationalisation of Immigrants in Spain” (DNIs), funded by the Open Society Foundation and has collaborated in many projects funded by the National Plan of R&D. She has been a visiting researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), Oxford University, in 2010 and the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM), Université de Liège, in 2012.