Radu was born in Bucharest, Romania, although he also holds Greek nationality and was raised bilingually as a speaker of Romanian and Greek. He worked early in his career in Romania and Greece and was educated in Romania and later in the UK. After his Romanian Baccalaureate awarded by the Elena Cuza National College, a prestigious high school in Craiova, Romania, he did military service specialising in communications. He then earned the Romanian degree Licenţa in Philology in Romanian Language and Literature, English Language and Literature, and Romance Linguistics at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, where his thesis explored metalinguistic aspects of language with particular reference to Romanian and English and illustrations from literary texts. In parallel, he earned his National Teaching Qualification, having taken courses in Teaching Methodology (mother tongue and second language), Pedagogy and Child Psychology. Fourteen years later, he earned an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London with the dissertation The Simple and Compound Past in Aromanian (a highly endangered variety of Romanian spoken in the Balkans). He is currently working on a PhD, and recently left SOAS to become a Teaching Fellow in Romanian at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East Euroopean Studies (UCL’s SSEES). His thesis is a fieldwork-based description and theoretical analysis of Blablanga (an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands) focusing on the interrelations between prosody, syntax and information structure.
Radu has taught as a graduate assistant at SOAS, and is also a teacher at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Language Centre, Westminster. Throughout his career he has worked as a freelance language tutor, translator, interpreter, proof-reader and editor for government (FCO, MoD, SOCA, HMRC), NGO (Amnesty International), corporate, and private clients in London and earlier in Athens. In 2001 he established the teaching of Romanian Language, Literature and Culture at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, where he was a Lecturer until 2005. During that period he did research on early Romanian manuscripts, prints and maps discovered in the archives of different monasteries at Mount Athos (Greece). He has also taught English for Academic Purposes at the Democritus and EFL in different settings in Greece, and served as an Examiner for the National School for Public Administration in Athens. He started his teaching career as an English and Romanian Language and Literature teacher at Carol I National College, Craiova preparing high school leavers for the Baccalaureate exams.