How Dr Simona Costanzo Sow left their lane.
Dr Simona Costanzo Sow moved from migration research into civil society and the UN – and now connects academia with the people tackling global challenges.
Dr Simona Costanzo Sow began by studying how people move across borders.
Her PhD in Human Geography at the Technical University of Munich focused on international migration, building on a Master’s in International Cultural and Business Studies. The research took her beyond the university too, including extensive fieldwork in Italy and North Africa.
Her career then moved from studying international systems to working inside the networks that shape them.
After early development work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Costanzo Sow spent eight years leading the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service, a global civil society organisation based at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The role put her between governments, NGOs, universities and communities – sectors that often approach the same problems with very different languages and assumptions.
She later joined the United Nations Volunteers programme, working on global initiatives around volunteerism and sustainable development before moving to the UN System Staff College in 2016.
There, her focus shifted again: from delivering programmes to helping the people inside international institutions think and work differently. She designed learning for senior UN leaders around the 2030 Agenda, systems thinking, policy coherence and new approaches to leadership.
Since 2023, she has served as Chief of Academic Partnerships.
Her job is to connect two worlds that need one another but do not always work at the same speed. UNSSC partners with universities to create joint degree programmes, applied research projects and spaces for science-policy-society dialogue – bringing academic thinking closer to the operational questions facing UN organisations, while giving researchers a clearer view of the problems institutions actually need help solving.
That makes her work less about transferring knowledge in one direction than creating the conditions for different kinds of expertise to meet.
She started out studying how people cross borders. Much of her career since has been about helping ideas cross them too.
Previously with <Dr Simona Costanzo Sow>
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