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 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2009/cr09245.pdf, co-written with two of her colleagues at the IMF's European Department, Spanish economist Marialuz Moreno-Badia, and Dutch economist Bob Traa.