Mateja Held was born in 1986. She completed the integrated undergraduate and graduate law studies at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia, in 2010. During the final semester of her studies at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, she enrolled in the Erasmus programme at the Faculty of Law University of Warsaw with an aim of research for her master thesis, and she graduated at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb with the topic “Comparison of Croatian and Polish Local Self – Government”. In 2011 she enrolled in the Postgraduate Doctoral Study of Public Law and Public Administration at Faculty of Law University of Zagreb where she gained her PhD in 2015 with the topic “Objective Administrative Dispute in Croatian and Comparative Law”.

Since 2010, she has been employed at the Department of Administrative Law, University of Zagreb, as a researcher (2010-2012), assistant (2012-2015), senior assistent (2015-2016), assistant professor (2016-2021) and today she is an associate professor at the Department of Administrative Law where she teaches at law studies, social work studies, at Centre for Public Administration and Public Finance. She teaches at the doctoral and specialist postgraduate study of Public Law and Public Administration. She also teaches Administrative Law and Police Administrative Law at the Police College at the Ministry of the Interior. She was mentor of numerous master thesis.

She actively participated in domestic and foreign scientific and expert conferences, published scientific and professional papers independently and in co-authorship. She has reviewed several scientific papers and one scientific project of the National Centre for Science in Poland.

She is a head of Administrative Compass – which functions as an expert practice for students at Centre for Public Adminstration and Public Finance where students under sthe supervision of professors at Faculty of Law in Zagreb give guidelines to public bodies and also give gudelines to citizens in problems in the area of public administration and public finance. She is an academic mentor in Legal Clinic, University of Zagreb, where she started the project of the External legal clinics. She was also the first coordinator of the External legal clinics. She is a member of the Secretariat of the Institute of Public Administration, a member of the Scientific Council for State Administration, Judiciary, and Rule of Law of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a member of the Commission for Local and Regional Self-Government Reform at the Ministry of Justice and Administration. She actively speaks English, and passively speaks German and Slovenian.