University of Tirana
University of Tirana was founded in 1957 as the State University of Tirana, through the merging of five existing institutes of higher education, the most important of which was the Institute of Sciences, founded in 1947. University of Tirana is the biggest university in Albania, and among the biggest in Europe with 35 000 students and more than 900 academic staff. It includes eight colleges, 50 academic departments, and 41 study programs or majors.
Profile of key people
Erka Caro, Ph.D.
researcher and lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Tirana, Albania. She received her PhD in Population Studies from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2011. She is a member of the executive board of Western Balkans Migration Network. She coordinated the Regional Research Promotion Program funded program ‘Industrial Citizenship and Labor Migration from Western Balkan, Cases of Albania and Kosovo migration to Germany, Switzerland and Greece’ and the Academy of Finland funded project “Industrial Citizenship and Labor Mobility in the EU: a Migrant Centered Study of Estonia-Finland and Albania-Italy Labor Mobility”. Her areas of expertise include migration, skills development, labor and migration policies, gender studies, Western Balkans and Southern Europe.
Elona Dhembo, Ph.D.
Since 2005, Dr. Elona Dhembo works for the University of Tirana as a full-time lecturer. She teaches social research methods and social policy for undergraduate and graduate programs at the Department of Social Work and Social Policy. She graduated in 2002 as a social worker from the same department. Her further studies, MSc. in Comparative Social Policy (at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford) and her PhD thesis (defended in 2012 at the University of Tirana), both, combine her core areas of interest – research methods, social policy, and gender issues. For five years (2010-2015) she was a Returned Scholar under OSI Europe Academic Fellowship Program. For two years (2014-2016), she served as Country Senior Advisor in evidence-based policymaking under the Swiss Government supported “Regional Research Promotion Program”, in the Balkans. In the last few years, she has grown particular interest in the area of migration and social protection where she has (co)authored several articles (including in peer-reviewed journals), and has been recently awarded a research fellowship by the Institute For Advanced Studies at the Central European University to further research in this area during the academic year 2019-2020.