When Sophia Russack talks about the EU, her sentences are long and her gestures grand. She doesn’t want to leave anything out when talking about her favorite topic. „The EU is unique because it’s a union of states that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world – that’s why it’s an exciting research subject“, says Russack, 36. She has been working as a research assistant at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels, a think tank that analyzes EU affairs, for seven years. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on how political the Commission was under Jean-Claude Juncker.