Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon is presently the ERC President ad interim after having been President from 2014 to 2019. He was the Director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, France (1994-2013). A mathematician by training, he spent his career as a fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has been President of the Société Mathématique de France, and of the European Mathematical Society. From the Académie des Sciences de Paris he received the Prix Paul Langevin and the Prix du Rayonnement Français in Mathematical Sciences & Physics. He is Doctor Honoris Causa of Keio University, Japan, of Nankai University, China, and of the University of Edinburgh.
David Sassoli started his career as a journalist, working as a news reporter for the Italian television. For more than 10 years, he was responsible for managing prime time news broadcasts on Rai Uno, covering major national and international events. On 7 June 2009, he was elected MEP of the Democratic Party and he was head of the Italian delegation in the EP. In 2014, he was re-elected as an MEP and was elected Vice-President of the EP, with responsibility for Mediterranean Policy, the budget and buildings. He was a member of the ITRE Committee and led on European railway reform and the Single European Sky. In May 2019, he began his third term as an MEP and on 3 July, he was elected President of the European Parliament.
Ursula von der Leyen was Minister at federal level in Germany for more than 14 years and responsible for family, then labour and social affairs and later defence. In 2019, she was elected as President of the European Commission. As the head of the European executive, she has defined six headline ambitions for Europe for her mandate: a European Green Deal, a Europe fit for the digital age, an economy that works for people, a stronger Europe in the world, promoting our European way of life, and a new push for European democracy.
Manuel HEITOR Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education of Portugal
Manuel Heitor holds a PhD from Imperial College of London in Mechanical Engineering and a post-doctorate in California University, in San Diego. He then pursued his academic career as Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon. He was co-Chairman of Instituto Superior Técnico between 1993 and 1998. And in 1998, he founded Center of Innovation, Technology and Development Policies Studies, IN+, at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon. In 2002, he was co-founder of the international network Globelics. He was Secretary of State of Science, Technology and Higher Education between March 2005 – June 2011 and was also Invited Professor at Harvard University, in the United States, in 2011 and 2012.
Christian-Silviu BUŞOI Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE)
Cristian-Silviu BUŞOI is a Member of the European Parliament and Chair of the Industry, Research and Energy Committee. He is also Member of the Delegation for Southeast Asia, as well as substitute Member of the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Delegation for the Arab Peninsula. Mr. Busoi graduated Medicine from Carol Davila University in Bucharest, Law from Titu Maiorescu University in Bucharest, and Diplomacy from the Romanian Diplomatic Institute in Bucharest. His political career started in 1996 when, as a student, he became member of the National Liberal Party. Eight years later, he entered the Romanian Parliament and, in 2013, became President of the Romanian National Health Insurance House. Since 2007, he has been elected to the European Parliament for three consecutive terms.
Katerina DOUKA Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (DE)
ERC grantee – FINDER project
Katerina Douka is an archaeological scientist and Group Leader of the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. She specialises in radiocarbon dating and the application of chronometric and biomolecular methodologies. She won an ERC Starting Grant in 2016.
Roberto NAVIGLI Sapienza University of Rome (IT)
ERC grantee – MultiJEDI and MOUSSE projects
Roberto Navigli is a computer scientist and language specialist working within the Department of Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome. In addition, he is head of the Sapienza Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group and creator of Babelnet, the largest multilingual encyclopaedic computational dictionary in the world. In 2013, he received the prestigious Marco Cadoli AI*IA prize for his results as a young Italian researcher working in the field of AI. He won an ERC Starting Grant in 2010, and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016.
Ülo NIINEMETS Estonian University of Life Sciences (EE)
ERC grantee - Sip-Vol+ project
Ülo Niinemets is an environmental scientist and biologist, specialising in the physiology of volatile organic compound emissions. He is Professor of Crop Science and Plant Biology within the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, based in Tartu, Estonia. He won an ERC Advanced Grant in 2012.
Mariya GABRIEL EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education & Youth
Before serving on the 2019-2023 Commission, Mariya Gabriel was European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society from 2017 to 2019. She was the Vice-President of the EPP Group in the European Parliament from 2014 to 2017. She was a Member of the European Parliament, EPP/GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) from 2009 to 2017. Since 2012, Mariya Gabriel has served as Vice-President of EPP Women. Prior to this, she was Parliamentary Secretary to MEPs from the GERB political party within the EPP Group in 2008-2009.
Tony Lockett is Head of Communication at the European Research Council Executive Agency. Before joining the ERC, he held communication and policy roles in several of the European Commission’s Directorates General. Tony studied Politics and International Relations at the University of Sussex, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Toulouse and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is a former European Union Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a member of the Advisory Board of the European Public Communication Conference, and a member of the European Association of Communication Directors.
