Delia Velculescu (born in 1975) is a Romanian-American economist and the IMF mission chief in Greece during the Greek government debt crisis, [1] before her replacement by Peter Dolman in 2018. [2]
She was born Delia Moraru in the city of Sibiu, in Transylvania, Romania. [1] [3] As a young student, she was taught in physics by future Romanian President Klaus Iohannis at Gheorghe Lazăr National College in Sibiu. [1] In 1992, she earned a scholarship to study economics at Wilson College, Pennsylvania, in the United States. [4] She later earned an MSc and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. [1] While at Johns Hopkins, she met her husband, Victor Velculescu, professor of oncology. [3]
She has been working for the IMF since 2002, and has supervised programs in Slovenia and Cyprus, [5] prior to becoming IMF mission chief in Greece.
Velculescu has studied the economic prospects of Greece for many years, and back in July 2009 she published a study on the Greek economy [1], co-written with two of her colleagues at the IMF's European Department, Spanish economist Marialuz Moreno-Badia, and Dutch economist Bob Traa.