Vera was a visiting researcher during the spring and winter quarters of 2009 CDDRL. She was also a doctoral candidate in the department of political and social sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany. In her thesis, she compared and explained the active engagement of Mediterranean non-member countries in cooperation with the European Union (EU) and its democracy promotion efforts. During her time at CDDRL, she finished the first draft of her thesis and coordinate the grant proposal for a joint research project, with Professors Stephen D. Krasner of Stanford University and Tanja A. Börzel of Freie Universität Berlin, on the "governance export" of international actors to areas of limited statehood.

Since 2005, she has been working as a research associate at the Center for European Integration at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she researches and teaches on the EU as an international actor and particularly on European neighborhood policies. She received a Master's degree in "European Studies" from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and the "Certificat d'Etudes Politiques" from the the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, France. Together with a colleague, she has contributed a chapter on "Comparing EU and US democracy promotion in the Mediterranean and the Newly Independent States" in a forthcoming (2009) volume edited by Amichai Magen, Michael McFaul and Thomas Risse.