Speakers

Mariya Gabriel is the Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education, Youth and Sport. Under her leadership, the new Horizon Europe, Erasmus+, and the cultural strand of Creative Europe programmes will be defined and implemented.

Professor Marion Koopmans is the director of the WHO collaborating centre for emerging infectious diseases at Erasmus, and Scientific Director “Emerging infectious diseases” of the Netherlands Centre for One Health (www.ncoh.nl).

Professor Maria Leptin is the President of the European Research Council. Prior to that, Professor Leptin served as Director of EMBO from 2010-2021. She also established a research group in Heidelberg at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The group studies the mechanics of shape determination during development.

Christiane Woopen has been Heinrich Hertz Professor of Life Ethics at the University of Bonn and founding director of the Center for Life Ethics since October 2021.

Leonard Burtscher is a staff astronomer and member of the faculty at the observatory of Leiden University and works on the instrumentation projects ELT/METIS and VLTI/MATISSE.

Dr. Tina Comes is Full Professor on Decision Theory & Information Technology for Resilience at the TU Delft, Netherlands, and Full Professor in Decision-Making & Digitalisation at the University of Maastricht.

Thomas Dermine is the State Secretary for Economic Recovery and Strategic Investment with responsibility for Science Policy, deputy to the Minister for the Economy and Labour in Alexander De Croo's federal government. 

Astrid is a theoretical physicist, and focuses on the fundamental building blocks of matter, space and time in her research.

Eric Lambin, a geographer and environmental scientist, divides his time between University of Louvain and Stanford University. He is member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors.

Professor Antonio Loprieno became the President of ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, in May 2018.

Marthe Nyssens is a professor of social economy at UCLouvain (Belgium). She has been prorector of UCLouvain on “Transition and Society” since September 2019.

Katrina is a London-born, Brussels-based (since 2007) moderator with a degree in Modern Languages from Oxford University.

Michael Bang Petersen is Professor at Aarhus University and investigates how the adaptive challenges of human evolutionary history shape the way modern citizens think about mass politics. He directs The Politics and Evolution Lab (PoNE Lab). 

Andrea Pető is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna Austria and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Marc Schiltz was appointed Secretary General of the FNR in 2011. As of November 2017, he is also President of Science Europe, an association of major European research funding and research performing organisations.

Dr Magdalena Skipper is Editor in Chief of Nature and Chief Editorial Advisor for Nature Research. A geneticist by training, she did her doctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Dominique Van Der Straeten is a senior full professor at Ghent University, and research director of the Laboratory of Functional Plant Biology (fpb.ugent.be). She conducted her PhD research at Harvard University with prof. H.M. Goodman and in Ghent with prof. M. Van Montagu.

Prof Karel Welle is the incoming Permanent Secretary of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB).

Prof. Didier Viviers is Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, and Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).