Maurizio Ferrera is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milano,  as well as founder and President of NASP (Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Sciences), a consortium for doctoral training  schools.  He has been Visiting Professor at numerous foreign universities, member of various scientific committees, co-director of the Rivista di Scienza Politica and Biblioteca della Libertà and is co-editor of an editorial series for Routledge. Since 2003 he has been a columnist for Corriere della Sera. He is a member of the jury of the Skytte Prize (Upssala University) and a corresponding member of the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere.

Ferrera has mainly worked on welfare states and European integration. His book on The Welfare State in Italy, published in 1984 (Il Mulino), was the first systematic empirical research on the topic, followed in 1983 by Models of Solidarity (1993, Il Mulino), with a more historical-comparative slant. In 1996, the essay Southern Welfare in Social Europe (“Journal of European Social Policy”) was published, which started the still ongoing debate on the distinctive characteristics of the welfare state in Mediterranean countries. In 2005, Ferrera published The Boundaries of Welfare. The New Spatial Politics of Social Protection (Oxford University Press), one of the first systematic contributions on the relationship between national solidarity and supranational integration.  His newest books  will appear in 2024: Politics and Social Visions. Ideology, Conflict and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford University Press) and Social Reformism 2.0 (with J. Mirò and S. Ronchi, Edward Elgar).

In 2013 Ferrera won a five-year ERC Advanced Grant for his project entitled “Reconciling Economic and Social Europe: the role of ideas, values, and politics” (REScEU: www.resceu.eu). In 2019 he won a six-year ERC Synergy Grant for a project entitled: Sovereignty, identity and Solidarity in the EU post-2008”, together with Hanspeter Kriesi (EUI, Florence) and Waltraud Schelkle (LSE).  In the same year,  Maurizio Ferrera was awarded  by the International Political Science Association  the  “Mattei Dogan” prize for High Achievement in Political Science.