Speakers

Dr Alenka Flander is the Director of the Centre of the Republic of Slovenia for Mobility and European Educational and Training Programmes (CMEPIUS), leading Slovene institution in the field of internationalisation of education and training. In that capacity she is responsible for successful implementation of EU programmes (Erasmus+) in Slovenia, focusing on achieving sustainable impact of the projects and programme and ensuring effective dissemination and integration of programme results into institutional and national systems and practices. Alenka was trained as an electrical engineer and completed her PhD in the Political Science. Her research work is interdisciplinary in nature and encompasses monitoring and measuring the impact of European Programmes in the area of education and training, and research on internationalisation and higher education. She contributed to national or international expert groups and authored publications and articles on internationalisation in higher education and academic profession. She was behind the preparation of Slovene Strategy for internationalisation of higher education adopted in 2016.

Ulrich Grothus is the President of ACA. He obtained a master’s degree in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1976. He then worked as a journalist before joining the International Division of the former West German Rectors Conference in 1982. He has been working for DAAD since 1988, first as spokesman and head of the president’s office. From 1991, he was consecutively director of all three DAAD program directorates. In between, he served as director of the Paris office from 1998 to 2000 and of the New York office from 2004 to 2008. Grothus was also the Deputy Secretary General of DAAD and the head of the organisation’s Berlin office. Grothus speaks five foreign languages and has given three others a try.

Josep M. Vilalta (Barcelona, 1965) is Director of the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi) and Executive Secretary of the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP). Specialist in public management and public policies and in higher education and scientific research management. He holds an experience of thirty years on different leading positions on public sector organizations as well as on different higher education institutions. He has promoted and participated in various projects and groups of experts of the Government of Catalonia and the Government of Spain, the European Commission, the OECD, UNESCO, and several countries in education and universities, political science and public policy management.

He has published nearly a hundred papers for journal and publications, book chapters and books on public administration, public policy, education, universities and scientific research policy. He is member of the group of experts of the Spanish university policy think tank Studia XXI, member of the Advisory Boards of Fundació iSocial and ‘El Diari de l’Educació’. He is a regular contributor to different national and international publications and to the newspapers La Vanguardia, ARA and NacióDigital. He holds a Degree in Geography and History (UB), a Master in Public Management (UAB), a Master in Political and Social Theory (UPF) and a Postgraduate in Management of Higher Education (Open University/Universiteit Twente). He has been promoter and director of the Master of Management and University Policy at UPC and visiting professor in different institutions.

Personal web: www.josepmvilalta.com.

Dr. Jan Kluge is a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna. After his time at the ifo Institute in Germany he joined the IHS group „Companies, Industries & Regions“ in 2017. His main research interest is applied regional economics, especially issues of sectoral diversification, growth and instability. His works include analyses concerning the advantages of localization economies through sectoral specialization as well as the stability enhancing effects of diversification. They also cover issues of political concentration (or fragmentation) in local decision-making units and investigate its impact on public spending. He published his results in the Journal of Regional Science, Kyklos, The Economics of Transition and the Review of Regional Research.

Dr Jeanine Gregersen-Hermans has been appointed as an Honorary Senior Fellow of Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) as of January 2019. Previously she held the role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Vice Principal (International) at GCU. Recently Jeanine joined Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Furthermore, she serves as a member of the Supervisory Board of the Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. Jeanine holds a PhD in Internationalisation of Higher Education and a Master of Science degree in Clinical Psychology. She publishes on topics of intercultural competence and internationalisation of higher education.

Since 2004, Dr. Lorraine McIlrath has coordinated the Community Knowledge Initiative (CKI) at the National University of Ireland Galway. There she is responsible for developing and supporting civic engagement activities across the university, with the CKI team, including service learning and student volunteering. Over the last two decades Lorraine has led and developed a number of national and international projects to further the civic and social role of higher education within society. From 2007 to 2012, she founded and was Principal Investigator (PI) of Campus Engage funded origionally by the Higher Education Authority (national Irish network to support civic engagement within higher education). Campus Enage is now a mainstream national programme and is based at the Irish Universities Association (IUA). She currently co-leads a national project to pilot the Carnegie Foundation Framework for Community Engagement in partnership with the University of Massachusetts and Merrimack College Boston supported by the Ireland Funds and the Talloires Network. She developed the opening of a new communtiy cafe concept based at ILAS called Saol Cafe (Irish for Life) in partnership with SCCUL Enterprises.giving people marginalised from employment an opportunity to work.

She has keynoted on her work around the world, from the USA to Saudi Arabia to Spain to Australia. She is a founding member partner in a nine university EU Tempus Funded Project to support the introduction of service learning to five universities in Jordan and Lebanon entitled the Tawasol Project. In 2014 she was elected to the Steering Committe of the Talloires Network. She co-directed the Europe Engage Project in partnership with the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has consulted for the British Council in Russia - supporting the development of the College for Multicultural Education in Sochi and worked for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA) as Programme Director in Northern Ireland.

She spent a decade in Northern Ireland lecturering at the University of Ulster's UNESCO Centre teaching courses on the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process and in an action research project exploring peer mediation as a process for conflict resolution with the EMU Peer Support Project. In addition, she was worked on the development of the Northern Ireland curricula framework for ‘Local and Global Citizenship' in partnership with the Citizenship Foundation, UNESCO Centre and CCEA.

Lorraine has published on the broad theme of civic engagement and higher education in books and journals and is co-editor of a number of books including Mapping Civic Engagement within Higher Education in Ireland (2009), National Survey of Civic Engagement within Higher Education in Ireland (Campus Engage 2011), Civic Engagement and Higher Education - Comparative Perspectives (2012), Higher Education and Community Based Research (2014), and recently published Embedding Service Learning in European Higher Education - Developing a Culture of Civic Engagement (2019). She is peer reviewer on a number of higher education journals and reviews a number of international university civic engagement awards.

Dr Pilar Aramburuzabala is the Director of the Department of Didactics and Theory of Education at the School of Teacher Training and Education of the Autonomous University of Madrid. She has been working in service-learning projects with university students since 2000. On the topic of civic engagement at Higher Education she has lectured, published, coordinated monographic issues and organized national and international conferences.

Since 2008 she oriented her research interests towards the fields of service-learning and education for social justice, and is an active member of the research group “Educational Change for Social Justice” (GICE).

She is the President of the Spanish University Service-Learning Association and works as an advisor to the Municipal Service-Learning Office of the Madrid City Council.

From 2014 to 2017 she lead the European project "Europe Engage - Developing a Culture of Civic Engagement through Service-Learning within Higher Education in Europe". She is now promoting the creation of a European association of service-learning in Higher Education. She is Director of the European Observatory of Service-Learning in Higher Education.

She chaired the 9^th Spanish and I European Conference on Service-Learning in Higher Education, that took place in September 20th-22th 2018 in Madrid.

Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Faculty of electrical engineering, University of Ljubljana. She has founded and is coordinating the national FabLab network in Slovenia. She is Director of Digital Innovation Hub Slovenia, whose main aim is to support the Slovenian industry, education and municipalities to fully benefit from digital innovations to upgrade its products and services, improve its processes and adapt its business models to the digital change. She is coordinating several projects on digitalization for innovation and rural development. Her work focuses mainly on the fields of open innovation, co-creation, user centered design and digitalization for development.

During 2014 and 2016, she was head of Demola Slovenia, part of Demola Network, which is recognized as best practice example for innovation policy makers by OECD and World Bank. She was the first chair of the IEEE “Women in engineering Slovenia”. One of her most important missions is to encourage young girls to study engineering, and later empower women to stay in the field and dare to take leadership positions in science and engineering. As such, in 2018 she was one of the 50 women from all over the world to take part in ‘Hidden No More’, one of the US State Department’s international visitor leadership exchange programmes, aimed at evening out the gender gap in STEAM. She was one of the ten nominees of the first “Female engineer of the year” competition in Slovenia.

In 1998 Jernej Pikalo graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in international relations, and in 2003 gained a doctorate in political science at the same faculty. His academic career at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana was marked by research and collaboration on numerous national and international projects covering a variety of political science issues. During his doctoral studies he performed research as part of the Marie Curie programme at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick in the UK.

He became an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2003, an associate professor in 2008, and in 2013 became a full professor of politology. From 2011 to 2013 he served as Vice Dean for undergraduate and master’s studies. Having been minister for education during the years 2013 and 2014, dr. Pikalo is presently again Slovene minister for education, science and sport, this time since 2018.

Since her Ph.D. from Yale University (1994), Sybille Reichert has been working as an expert on Higher Education policy development and institutional reform, focussing on issues of institutional development, internationalisation and organisational reform at universities as well as on higher education reforms in Europe.

After three years at ETH Zurich as head of strategic planning, Reichert set up her own consultancy firm in 2004 (Reichert Consulting for Higher Education). Her mandates combined institutional reform agendas with global higher education developments, at a wide range of institutions all over Europe, from individual universities to national ministries, rectors’ conferences or European organisations such as the European University Association (EUA) or the League of European Research Universities (LERU). Reichert also participated frequently in formative University Evaluations, at faculty, institutional and system level and was a member of the expert pool of the Institutional Evaluation Programme of the European University Association.

From 2014 to 2016 she was the chancellor of the University Erlangen-Nürnberg. As member of the executive board, CFO and COO, she was responsible for finances, infrastructures, services, personnel and organisational development. Highlights of her mandate include the consolidation of the previously deficitary budget, successful lobbying and planning for more than 400 million worth of infrastructural investments as well as the introduction of systematic personnel development for administrative support staff.

In July 2016 she has resumed her international consulting activity, with mandates ranging from policy development for higher education systems to coaching institutions in their strategic and organisational development and improvement of internal structures, processes and services.

From 2003 to 2010, Reichert served as senior advisor to the European University Association (www.eua.be). 2009 to 2012 she was a Member of the Catalan Research and Innovation Council. 2007 -2012 she was a member of the Konstanz Wissenschaftsforum.

Reichert is a member of the Austrian Science Board (Österreichischer Wissenschaftsrat, www.wissenschaftsrat.ac.at, since 2016) and is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Université de Lyon (www.universite-lyon.fr, since 2017).

Kees Kouwenaar is Secretary General of the Aurora universities network – seconded by his employer the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he also acts as Director of the Mastermind Europe initiative. As part of his role with Aurora, he is editor of the Aurora Brief Reviews, a biweekly digital publication which identifies and describes relevant data-driven reports on any aspect of the international dimension of higher education and research.

Between 2008 and 2012, he was Director of VU’s Centre for International Cooperation. In this caacity he was responsible for a new comprehensive internationalisation strategy and a reorganised comprehensive VU International office.

Prior to 2008, he was Director of the Center for International Legal Cooperation and Group Director at Nuffic for Higher Education internationalisation and for Credential Evaluation. He was lead expert, workshop chair and final rapporteur for the Lisbon Recognition Convention of 1997. He served as chairman of the NARIC network and EAIE´s professional section for admission & credential evaluation. Kees has presented and chaired at numerous conferences in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia.

Since September 2018, he serves on the General Council of the EAIE: European Association for International Education.

Kees Kouwenaar studied history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is married and has three adult daughters. He serves as member and acting chair of the supervisory board of the Stedelijke Gymnasium Leiden (a pre-university secondary school in the Netherlands).

Dan is a Policy Manager overseeing two work programmes – the first being Brexit, which involves ensuring that universities are best placed to address the many challenges but also maximise on any opportunities resulting from the UK’s decision to leave the EU, covering a range of issues from mobility and collaboration, through to funding.

Laura E. Rumbley is Associate Director, Knowledge Development & Research at the European Association for International Education (EAIE). She previously served (2012-2018) as Associate Director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE), and as Deputy Director (2010-2012) of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). Laura has (co)authored and (co)edited a wide range of publications, including the 2009 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education foundational document, Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution; International Briefs for Higher Education Leaders (a series co-published by CIHE and the American Council on Education); and EAIE’s Forum magazine (2013-2018). A former US Foreign Service Officer, Laura currently serves a co-editor for the Journal of Studies in International Education (Routledge).

Pavel Zgaga is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His primary research interest is in higher education studies. He has held several research grants and directed or contributed to a number of national and international research projects mainly focused on contemporary higher education issues, education policy and reforms in the contemporary European context. In this areas he has published extensively. He is a member of the editorial boards for several international research journals. In his field of expertise, he has been also co-operating with international organisations, e.g. the Council of Europe, the European Commission, UNESCO, OECD, etc. and has been a consultant and invited speaker to a number of countries. – In the 1990s, during the period of social and political transition in Slovenia he was State Secretary for Higher Education (1992–1999) and Minister of Education and Sport (1999–2000). After his return to academe, he co-founded the Centre for Educational Policy Studies (CEPS, 2001) at the University of Ljubljana and has been its director until today. In the early years of the Bologna Process he was engaged as the general rapporteur (2001-2003) for the Berlin Conference, as a member of the Board of the Bologna Follow-up Group (2004-2005) and as the rapporteur of the BFUG Working Group on External Dimension of the Bologna Process (2006-2007).