Sebastiaan Princen (1971) studied public administration and public policy studies at the University of Twente, where he obtained his MA in 1997. In 1998, his MA thesis on the impact of block grants on power relations between central and local government was awarded the annual thesis award by the Dutch Association for Public Administration (VB).

In 2002, Sebastiaan received a PhD from the faculties of Law and Social Science at Utrecht University. His PhD dissertation analysed the conditions under which EU trade measures affect regulatory standards in the US and Canada, and was published as 'EU Regulation and Transatlantic Trade' with Kluwer Law International in 2002. In 2003, the dissertation was awarded the annual political science award by the Dutch Political Science Association (NKWP).

After a year at the Rottedam based economic research and consultancy firm Ecorys NEI, Sebastiaan joined the Utrecht School of Governance in November 2002, where he has worked as a postdoc, assistant professor and associate professor, and between 2013 and 2018 as full professor. In 2007, he worked as a research fellow at the Center for American Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP) of the University of Washington (Seattle). As of July 2010, he als became a fellow at the Montesquieu Institute in The Hague.

During the past years, Sebastiaan has published books and articles on various aspects of European governance, most prominently in relation to policy-making and agenda-setting in the European Union. In addition, he has contributed to several textbooks on the EU and EU politics, including The Politics of the European Union (with Herman Lelieveldt, Cambridge University Press, 2015).