Sorin Maxim
Fellow 2021
Sorin Maxim was born on July 17, 1972, in Western Romania, in Resita, a strongly industrialized city, where he graduated from the Industrial High School, specializing in Electrical Engineering, being passionate about mathematics.
He continued his schooling in Timișoara, at the West University, where he was admitted to the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science specialization, which he graduated in 1996. After completing his military service, in 2000-2004, he also graduated from the Faculty of Economics.
As a young student, he founded a company in the field of printing and data processing and during the same period of time he worked at the Caras-Severin Department of Labor and Social Protection. From 1997, he started working at the Caras-Severin County Development Agency, until 1999, when he was hired at the West Regional Development Agency – West RDA. He is among the 5 people who set up this institution.
In 2001 he became the director of West RDA, at that time an institution with 15 people working there, position he still holds today, but in an institution that has known continuous development for two decades and now has 155 employees. We are talking about people who manage 2 billion euros – urban and social infrastructure projects in the public and private areas, to support micro-enterprises and SMEs in the Western Region.
In 2016, he served as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration for 4 months, a position from which he resigned and, in 2020, he was nominated as Minister of European Funds, a position he refused for personal reasons.
He believes in the power of decentralization, for which he strongly militated from his position of president of ROREG – Regional Development Agencies Association in Romania. And its efforts as an initiator of the decentralization of regional programs are about to materialize through the decentralization of the management of regional development European funds.
His dream is to take regional development to another level in Romania through debureaucratization and especially through projects made for people, projects which respond to the real and different needs of local communities, through a permanent collaboration with the European Commission and a vision connected to the direction in which Europe is heading today.
Sorin is a leader and a good communicator, he is captivated by working with people, he is a trainer and a mentor for his colleagues.
He is a fellow of the third edition of the Aspen Public Service Leadership Program, Spring Cohort 2021.