Home>A rewarding CIVICA experience: Gabriela Berbert-Born’s testimonial
12 June 2026
A rewarding CIVICA experience: Gabriela Berbert-Born’s testimonial
Gabriela Berbert-Born is a PhD researcher at Sciences Po Law School, where she conducts research in comparative constitutional law under the supervision of Professor Guillaume Tusseau. In this testimonial, she reflects on her experience with the European university alliance CIVICA, and its programmes, highlighting the value of the methodological training offered by partner universities for early-career researchers.
You recently attended the CIVICA course “Introduction to Survey Research: Benefits and Pitfalls from Design to Implementation course” offered by the Hertie School of Governance. Could you please tell us how you found out about this opportunity and what your experience of the course was?
I first heard about the course through an email from Sciences Po’s School of Research.
I found the course both interesting and genuinely useful. Despite being online and covering dense methodological content, the sessions were engaging and interactive. The group activities and discussions allowed us to work directly with doctoral researchers from different countries and disciplinary backgrounds, which made the experience especially rich.
The final assignment was, for me, the most valuable part: we had to design a survey instrument connected to our own doctoral research, present it, and discuss it with the group. It gave me the opportunity to receive valuable feedback from Dr. Jessica Breaugh Bossdorf - an excellent lecturer - as well as from researchers working in very different fields and countries, most of whom had much more experience with survey methods than I did. This was particularly helpful in refining my own project.
Would you recommend that other doctoral researchers from Sciences Po register for courses offered by our CIVICA partner universities? If so, why?
I would definitely recommend that other doctoral researchers from Sciences Po register for courses offered by CIVICA partner universities. Beyond the specific methodological training, these courses create a valuable space to test ideas, receive feedback from outside one’s usual academic environment and connect with researchers across Europe. I would warmly recommend the experience!
Biography:
Gabriela Berbert-Born is a PhD student at the Sciences Po Law School and a member of the Law School’s Research Centre. Her research focuses on comparative constitutional law, under the supervision of Professor Guillaume Tusseau. Her research interests extend more broadly to procedural law, regulation, competition law, legal theory and empirical methods applied to law. Her thesis is entitled: “Filtering Mechanisms in Concrete Constitutional Review: A Comparative Analysis”. Before joining Sciences Po, she worked notably with the President of the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil, for the OECD, the Brazilian Competition Authority (CADE) and the Brazilian National Congress.
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