Jerneja Penca (Associate Professor, Senior Research Associate) is the Head of the Mediterranean Institute for Environmental Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper. She researches multi-level environmental and sustainability governance encompassing various regimes, including biodiversity, climate change, plastics pollution, fisheries and blue economy. In her work, she is committed to an effective science-policy interface, and contributes to the work of IPBES and MedECC. Her PhD in law is from the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy and her LLM degrees from the EUI and University of Nottingham, UK. She holds an international relations degree from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.