Andrea M. Schneider is Deputy Head of Staff for Policy Planning in the Office of Germany’s Federal Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Her area of work is the development, implementation, and management of strategic innovation projects, e.g. the Chancellor’s ‘Dialogue on Germany’s future’,  the Government’s  Strategy 'Wellbeing in Germany ', the Chancellor’s ‘International German Forum’, and Government Foresight utilization and skill-building. The project ‘effective government’ which started in 2015 promotes the use of empirical methods of social sciences as well as behavioral insights within the government to raise effectiveness.  Before joining the Staff for Policy Planning in 2007 she has studied and taught economic policy and development economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Leeds, UK, and worked as director of the Economic Policy Group at the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. She has a PhD in economics and has published on different topics.