Dr Gulara Guliyeva has been studying EU law since 1999. Initially, she researched and published predominantly in the area of EU external relations. In 2006, while writing her LLM thesis on EU accession conditionality to Turkey, she was fascinated by commentators’ harsh criticisms to external and internal discrepancy in EU’s minority protection. She decided to investigate the state of minority protection within the EU. The title of her PhD thesis was “The Rights of Minorities in the European Union”. The thesis focused on several case studies concerning the most problematic aspects of minority protection, such as political rights, education in a minority language, freedom to manifest religion in publicly-funded schools, and the right to autonomy. The case studies tested the potential of existing EU rules to address minority issues in EU Member States, such as Latvia, Belgium and the UK. Finally, drawing on the conclusions of all of the case studies, an EU regime for minority protection was proposed. Dr Guliyeva’s current and future research aspirations include EU Anti-Discrimination Law, Fundamental Rights in the EU, European Human Rights Law, and Minority Rights Law.