By Mari Megias
SEBASTIAN BURDUJA MPP/MBA 2011 was just four years old when Romanians overthrew longtime dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose regime was marked by repression and abuse. Today, Burduja serves as Minister of Energy in Romania’s democratically elected government, where he works to improve people’s lives, advocate for freedom, and fight corruption.
“I was a kid when the revolution happened, but my parents and grandparents talked to me about … what it means to live in an unfree society,” he said in a 2018 documentary. Burduja took these lessons to heart. He came to the United States for college at Stanford, where he cofounded the League of Romanian Students Abroad (LSRS), an organization that connects the Romanian diaspora and empowers them to shape the future of their home nation. LSRS has endured: With 14,000 members, it leverages its influence to transform new generations’ ideas into concrete projects that advance progress in Romania.
After college, Burduja moved to the East Coast to attend Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School as a David M. Rubenstein Fellow. “I am a proud ‘jointee,’ as we used to say, having graduated the HKS-HBS joint MPP/MBA program. I loved both sides of the river, but in hindsight and given my current career path, HKS laid the foundation for my public administration skills. More importantly, it set my guiding leadership principles and gave me multiple tools for managing teams in the public sector, navigating through various bureaucratic layers, and pushing through a reformist agenda while communicating proactively to the general public.”
He worked for a dozen years as a development specialist at organizations including Dalberg Global Development Advisors and the World Bank, then returned to Romania to fulfill a personal mission: to strengthen his nation’s democracy and accelerate economic development. “At the end of the day, I felt that my impact would be much higher by coming back,” says Burduja. “In the 1840s, the first generation of Romanians educated abroad came back to their home country and proceeded to build modern Romania. Their example inspired me—and others—to do the same. I aimed to contribute to a better Romania, reclaiming people’s hopes and rebuilding their confidence in liberal democracy.”
“In the 1840s, the first generation of Romanians educated abroad came back to their home country and proceeded to build modern Romania. Their example inspired me—and others—to do the same.”
He continued to inspire Romania’s rising generations through the Youth Civic Action Platform (PACT), a new political party he founded to drive reform. At the same time, he rallied Romanians living abroad to help chart their country’s future by voting.
In Romania, Burduja became active in the pro-European National Liberal Party, with which PACT had merged, and was elected to parliament and appointed to several government roles. He focused on creating economic opportunities as the secretary of state in the Ministry of Public Finance, and later, as minister of research, innovation, and digitalization, he transformed the nation’s digital landscape by instituting online transactions for permits and other services, implementing a new governmental cloud that connected all public institutions, and helping to pass a cybersecurity law.
Today, as minister of energy, Burduja is confronting the effects of the war in Ukraine and Europe’s volatile energy landscape by diversifying energy sources, accelerating the green transition, and modernizing the national grid. He is also expanding energy access to Romania’s remote villages. “Many of us take for granted the fact that we can turn on the lights, have hot water and heat, and use the microwave,” says Burduja. “The truth, however, is that there [are] too many Romanians—especially those in rural areas—who do not have these fundamental services.”
His overarching goal is to create a better world for future generations of Romanians—a vision that crystalized at HKS, where he determined to “leave behind more than I took from the world.”
In a sense, his life has come full circle. Listening to protesters during the revolution, he was struck by a profound sense of optimism. “There was just so much hope when people were chanting freedom, ‘libertate, libertate.’ You can hear it all over again, that feeling that we could really do anything, be free in this country.” His life’s work is to make this happen.
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Photograph courtesy of Sebastian Burduja