Martin Westlake is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE European Institute. He has spent over four decades studying European integration and working in European Union government and politics. Having completed a first degree in philosophy, politics and economics at University College, Oxford, he went on to take a master's degree at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (Bologna Center) and a PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Since beginning his professional life as a clerk to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, he has worked in the EU’s Council of Ministers and European Commission, with the European Parliament and, since 2003, in the European Economic and Social Committee, where he served as Secretary General, 2008-2013.

Martin Westlake has published widely on the European institutions and on European and British politics. He is also the author of a major political biography (Kinnock, The Biography). He has occupied a number of visiting positions and, from 2000 to 2005, was a visiting professor at the College of Europe, Bruges, teaching a seminar on the European Parliament. Since 2013 he has been a Visiting Professor at the College, running a research seminar on Constitutional, Institutional and Political Reform in the EU. In 2019-2020 he was David Davies of Llandinam Research Fellow in the LSE’s Department of International Relations, where he ran an innovatory seminar series bringing together practitioners from the European Union institutions and theoreticians from the Department of International Relations under the umbrella title of 'The European Union's New Foreign Policy.'

At the European Institute he co-chairs and co-organizes, together with Visiting Professor in Practice Anthony Teasdale, the 'European Union in Practise: Politics and Power in the Brussels System' seminar series.