Jens Woelk is Associate Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law and Coordinator of the interdisciplinary PhD Programme in International Studies at the University of Trento (Italy). Woelk took his PhD in Legal Sciences at the University of Regensburg (Germany). He has been Senior Researcher at the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen since 1994. His research fields are comparative federalism, constitutional law of the EU, legal management of diversity and constitutional transformation in South-Eastern Europe. In the Western Balkans he has been engaged in projects and expert missions for the EU and the Council of Europe. He is member of the Group of Independent Experts of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in Europe (CoE).