Petra Holtrup Mostert received her master's degree (1995) and doctorate (1998) from the University of Bonn, chair of Prof. Karl Kaiser. After completing her doctorate in the field of international environmental policy, she went to the University of Colorado at Boulder for a year with the ERP scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation as a research scholar and later worked for the German Society for Foreign Policy in Berlin. From August 2007 to September 2008 she was Program Director at Zeppelin University in the Department of Public Management and Governance and lectured on the subject of "International Relations". She has been the managing director of the IPZ since September 2010.