Mark Thatcher read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College Oxford, and then qualified as a Barrister. Thereafter he took his doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford. He spent five years researching and lecturing in Paris, before joining LSE in 1995. He has also been a Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute, Florence. His book, Internationalisation and Economic Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2007) won the 2008 Charles Levine Prize for best book in comparative policy and administration awarded by the SOG committee of the International Political Science Association.