Liesbet Hooghe is the W.R Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Research Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence. She was born and educated in Belgium (KU Leuven), taught at the University of Toronto (1994-2000), and moved to Chapel Hill in 2000.

Hooghe has had fellowships and visiting professorships at Cornell University; Nuffield, Oxford; the EUI, Florence; the WZB Berlin; VU Amsterdam; Konstanz University; Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst; Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; IAS Vienna; Sciences Po-Paris; the Free University of Berlin. She is a former chair of the European Politics & Society section of the APSA and of the European Union Studies Association. In 2017 she received the APSA Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award. Hooghe is PI of a five-year advanced European Research Grant on Transnational - local triggers, social networks, and group identities (2021-2026), which seeks to explain political polarization in Europe and the US.

Hooghe’s research and teaching are chiefly in comparative politics, multilevel governance, international organisation, political behaviour, and measurement. She has published in the leading journals of political science. From 2010 to 2015, she was co-leading with Gary Marks an ERC-funded project on multilevel governance, summarized in four books published by Oxford University Press. Since 1999, Hooghe has been a PI of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on political parties.