Enrico Piazza is Italian. He was educated in Italy as an Electronic Engineer with a thesis on Air Traffic Control (ATC), and later awarded the doctorate in Environmental Monitoring (satellite images etc.) to come back to ATC working in a Norwegian Company. He is presently doing research in projects sponsored by the fifth framework programme of the European Union, soon to start working in the next project, sponsored by the sixth framework programme.

Enrico's special interest in the topic of the conference originates from his own mobility experience, moving not only from one country to another, but also from academia to industry. He is also the chairman of the Postgraduate International Network (PI-Net for short) which he represents in the Steering Committee of the conference.

Charles Woolfson is Reader in Industrial Relations at the University of Glasgow from which he received his doctoral degree. He is Director of the European Centre for Occupational Health, Safety and the Environment (ECOHSE) at Glasgow which specialises in academic exchanges of knowledge in safety and health and working environment issues between Members State and Accession State academics, researchers and practitioners. Woolfson was formerly Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Director of the Graduate School. His main research has been in labor disputes, socio-legal studies of the regulation of health and safety, corporate social responsibility and the offshore oil industry. He is a member of the Glasgow Baltic Studies Unit, the leading centre for Baltic Studies in the UK. He has also held a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher Fellowship in Lithuania for nine months during which he conducted field survey work in enterprises and workplaces throughout Lithuania. He is currently negotiating a Marie Curie Chair award with EuroFaculty at the University of Latvia which will allow him to develop postgraduate teaching and research and promote European researcher mobility among younger scholars throughout the Baltic region.

Raoul Tan is finishing his PhD thesis at the Department of Genetics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Mobility was an important issue during his undergraduate studies as he studied in Leiden, London, Oxford and Paris. As PhD student Raoul was board member of the National Dutch PhD Student Council and founding member and president of Eurodoc. Currently, Raoul is member of the Eurodoc workgroup on international mobility and is interested in founding national PhD student councils in central-eastern Europe.

Patricia Arsene was born in Bucharest/Romania in 1962. She graduated from the Power Engineering Faculty of the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 1985. Until 1991 she worked as a design engineer at the Institute for Power Engineering Studies in Bucharest. That year represented the beginning of her academic career in the Faculty of Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest. In 1999, she obtained her PhD in Automated Systems with a thesis in the field of Fault Detection in Industrial Processes. Every year during the period of 1995-2003 she has visited the Technical University Darmstadt, Institute of Automatic Control, with a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Patricia Arsene currently holds a position as an associate professor, giving lectures in Control Theory, Power Plants Automation and System Analysis in Industrial Information. Since September 2003 she is also head of the Science Policy and Scientometrics Department within the Romanian Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research Funding.

Dora Groo is a medical doctor by profession. She worked for 10 years in pharmaceutical research and received her PhD in experimental medicine. She published several papers in international scientific journals in this field. Since 1991 she has been the program manager of the U.S.-Hungarian Science and Technology Joint Fund. After the establishment of the Hungarian Science and Technology Foundation in 1994 she became the director of the organisation. Under her leadership the foundation significantly extended its activity, turning from a two-member small office into a multifunctional organisation working in several fields of Hungary's international RTD relations. Her work was supported by her management studies, which resulted in an MBA degree in 2002. In 2002 she was appointed by EC - DG RTD to serve as a Project Technical Assistant for the FP5 Quality of Life thematic programme. She is representing Hungary in the Enwise STRATA ETAN expert group in the field of women & science.

Timo Lajunen was born in Helsinki in Finland in 1968. He graduated at the University of Helsinki Psychology Department (MPsych) at 1993 and four years later obtained a PhD in psychology in the same department with a thesis "personality, driving style and traffic safety". After finishing his PhD, Timo did his post-doctoral studies in Manchester University as a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1999, he has been working at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara as an associate professor. His studies are mainly related to traffic and driver behaviour, cross-cultural psychology and personality psychology.

Carolina Cañibano works as Assistant Professor at the Economics Department of the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid, where she is finishing her PhD. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the role played by qualified human capital within innovation systems, particularly in Spain. The dynamics of labour markets for researchers has therefore been and will still be in the future one of her main research interests. She is especially interested in contributing to the conceptual and empirical understanding of researchers' professional mobility as a key phenomenon that might enhance innovation and scientific national performance. She has been participating in the European Network for Human Mobility (ENMOB) and at present is actively involved in the activities of PRIME European Network of Excellence (Policies for Research and Innovation in the Move towards the European Research Area).

Inese Sviestina is a doctoral student from the Latvian Academy of Culture (Riga, Latvia) - Department of the History and Theory of Culture. Her main interest in connection with her thesis is focused on the relationships between intellectuals and power (mainly in the second half of the XXth century). Inese has an MA in music pedagogy (1999) and history and theory of culture (2001). She also holds an MSc in pharmacy (2002). Since last year she is a member of the Eurodoc Mobility Workgroup.

Sandra Bohlinger was born in Karlsruhe/Germany in 1973. She graduated from the human and social sciences faculty of the University of Karlsruhe and worked as a trainer and consultant for software producers. In 2000 she returned to university and received her PhD with a thesis in the field of vocational education research. She is currently holding a post-doc researcher position at the Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany) and a teaching position at the AKAD in Stuttgart (Germany), a private University. Her main research is on the impacts of globalisation on the European education area, human resources & business management and vocational education systems. She is currently working on a project concerned with continuing vocational education for the CEDEFOP.

She is a member of the Eurodoc mobility workgroup and of THESIS e.V., the German Network of Young Researchers.

Founder member and past president of Euroscience, Claude Kordon was for many years the head of a neuroscience research unit of the French Institute for Health and Medical research. He served in several study sections and scientific committees in France, Germany and Canada, as well as with the European Science Foundation. He also convened in 2001 the EC Bischenberg workshop on "The future of young scientists in Europe.

Toni Gabaldon was born in Valencia (Spain) in 1973, He graduated in Biological Sciences and later specialized in Molecular Biology. Presently he is working as Junior researcher in the Bioinformatics department of Nijmegen University (The Netherlands) where he is pursuing a PhD on computational genomics.

He has been active in the creation of the Spanish young researchers federation and has been a founder and board member of EURODOC, association in which he coordinates a workgroup on "International Mobility".
 

Françoise Praderie is an honorary astronomer at Paris Observatory. Her professional life was dedicated to stellar astrophysics, including stellar seismology by means of space observations. She worked also as head of a department for the French research minister H. Curien, then as executive secretary of the newly created Megascience Forum at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), then as adviser to the Director of International Relations at the CNRS. She was one of the initiators of Euroscience and its first Secretary General.

Damjan Nemec was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1975. Mobility played an important role in his life from the start as he lived in Baghdad, Iraq, where he followed the first four grades of primary school at the English speaking International UNICEF School. During his undergraduate chemical engineering studies at the University of Ljubljana he spent several months in South Africa and Spain as part of a student exchange program (IAESTE). In 2003 he completed his Ph.D. studies at the National Institute for Chemistry in Ljubljana. Currently he is experiencing both regional as well as institutional mobility by having joined Akzo Nobel Chemicals company (Arnhem, the Netherlands) as a Marie Curie fellow.

Damjan Nemec has been involved with the issues of young researchers for a number of years now. In particular, he has been working with the Association of Postgraduate Students of Slovenia (DMRS) for several years. He is also a board member of the Postgraduates' International Network (PI-Net), and recently he also joined the Marie Curie Fellowship Association.

My name is Campbell Warden and I was born in Scotland, but have lived most of my life in other European countries. I currently live in Tenerife together with my Spanish wife and two of our three children.

I have been a member of EARMA since 1995 and a member of its working group on Equal Opportunities since its creation (1998). At present I lead the Working Group on Valuing Intangibles and Managing Knowledge (VIMaK) in Higher Education and Research Organisations (HEROs). I've been a member of Euroscience since 1998 and, while living in Brussels, served as the Vice-Chairperson of the 'EuroScience Greater Brussels' local Section. I served as Rapporteur for the working group on "Culture and Education" of the International Conference on "WOMEN, SCIENCE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY: What does the future hold for the Mediterranean?" in Turin, Italy in 1999, as part of the preparation of the World Science Conference in Budapest later that year. I was also a member of the team of experts that imparted a series of courses in 2000, within the programme "Training the Women Trainers" funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the UNESCO-ILO centre in Turin.

My main concern in the issues addressed by this workgroup is the need for proper education/training for the Administrative staff at Universities & Research Centres that are in contact with "mobile researchers". Usually they have no personal experience of their problems!

Professor Louise Ackers is Director of the Centre for the study of law in Europe (CSLPE) at the University of Leeds, UK. CSLPE is an inter-disciplinary research centre focusing on aspects of European law and policy. Professor Ackers' work focuses on aspects of highly skilled migration within the EU and in particular on science mobility. She is currently working on an impact assessment of the Marie Curie Programme and a series of externally-funded projects concerned with science mobility. This includes work on the regional effects ('brain drain') etc and the gender/family issues.

She can be contacted on H.L.Ackers@leeds.ac.uk.

Christine Heller del Riego is of Spanish/US origin and has been living in Europe for the last 24 years. Having pursued her studies in four different academic systems she obtained a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería (ICAI) of the Universidad Pontificia Comillas (UPCO) in Madrid, where she is a professor of Electric Machines since 1997. Recipient of a Human Capital and Mobility Grant of the European Commission in 1993, she did her Ph.D. research work at SUPELEC in Paris and obtained her Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). On returning to Madrid in 1996, she initiated the Spanish Group of the MCFA and from 1998-2000 she was the MCFA Board Member responsible for Scientific Excellence.

She participated in the UNESCO/ICSU World Conference on Science in 1999 and was active in the establishment of the "International Forum of Young Scientists" - a permanent platform to allow for input on Science Policy from the younger generation - that has since been renamed  "World Academy of Young Scientists" - WAYS.Since 2001, Christine is a member of the Governing Board of Euroscience and in 2002 she initiated a working group for representatives from MCFA, EURODOC and PI-Net to collaborate in activities towards fulfilling their shared objectives. Finally, Christine is a member of the ESOF2004 Steering and Programme Committee and is the coordinator of activities related to young researchers.

Gadi Rothenberg was born in Jerusalem in 1967, and immediately (well, twenty-six years later) was awarded a BSc in Chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then did an MSc and a PhD in Applied Chemistry, and meanwhile practiced and taught Shaolin Kung-Fu. He worked two years as a Marie Curie fellow at The University of York (in England), and then moved to Amsterdam to set up a new interdisciplinary research group in combinatorial catalysis. He is now a tenured assistant professor in the van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences. Gadi's research team works on catalyst discovery & optimisation, and on solving data explosion problems in catalysis. He has co-authored >45 papers and invented two patents, one of which forms the base of a start-up company. In September 2003 he was awarded a personal research grant of  $750,000 from the Dutch Science Foundation. For more info surf to http://www.science.uva.nl/~gadi.

Renzo Rubele is a doctoral candidate in Physics at the University of Salerno (Italy). He graduated at the University of Padova with a Master ("laurea") thesis on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. His current field of research is Condensed Matter Theory. He is engaged in the associative life of doctoral candidates at the national and international level: in Italy he is currently Deputy Vice-President of ADI and National Coordinator of the workgroup ADI-LEX (legal affairs), and in Europe he has been Vice-President of EURODOC since February 2003.

Magda Lola graduated with first class honours from the Physics Department of the National University of Athens and obtained a PhD from the University of Oxford, for research on Particle Physics and Cosmology. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg and CERN's Theory Division (1993-2000) and subsequently joined CERN's Human Resources, as a Deputy Group Leader for Recruitment. In June 2003, she was elected to an Associate Professorhip in Physics (University of Patras, Greece).

Magda Lola is currently the Secretary General of the Marie Curie Fellowship Association and coordinates its science policy activities in the areas of equal opportunities, recruitment and benchmarking of administrative framework conditions for research mobility in Europe.

Liviu Ornea was born in Bucharest, on 14.07.1960. He studied at the University of Bucharest where he also got a Ph.D. in mathematics (specifically in differential geometry) in 1992 and where he is now an associate professor. He (co)-authored more than 30 scientific papers and a monograph in Birkhäuser. Although so faithful to the University of Bucharest, he travelled a lot: he visited the university "La Sapienza" in Rome (once as a postdoc with an Italian fellowship for foreign mathematicians), the university "Jussieu" in Paris, the "Max Planck Institute" in Bonn, the "École Polytechnique" in Paris, the "Erwin Schrödinger Institute" in Vienna etc.

For those who want to know more: http://gta.math.unibuc.ro/pages/lornea.html

Benedikt Hoffmann studied biology and public law in Germany and France. He holds a PhD in biology from the University of Freiburg. Two years ago he joined a leading management consulting company where he has been working in the healthcare and financial sector. He is member of Euroscience since 1998 and joined the board of this organization two years ago. Beside Europe his passion belongs to South America, where he is setting up a funding scheme for pupils and students with no financial resources. His leisure activities are: family, hiking, walking, swimming, reading and dancing. His preferred quote: Try the impossible, to make the possible happen. :-)
 

Paola di Pietrogiacomo is a senior researcher at the Institute for Perspective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission Joint Research Center. After her first degrees (Arabic and Political Sciences) she did her doctoral studies at the European University Institute (EUI) in Fiesole (Italy) followed by several years dealing with European research policy decision making processes, as an official at the European Parliament Research Committee. She came back to research in 2000, within IPTS where she is presently participating in research activities supporting the progress of the European Research Area, mainly focusing on the aspects related to career developments and career paths of researchers in Europe.

Alex Lewis was born in 1979 in northern England but was a child of the 1970s Anglo-American bioscience Brain Drain, living all her pre-school years in Toronto and Detroit where her parents had post-doc and lecturing contracts. She then lived in Dundee (Scotland) for school years and moved on to study Geology at Imperial College, London in 1996. On moving to the University of Birmingham in 1999 to undertake postgraduate study, she became chair of the postgrads' committee; developing a greater interest in student representation, she became the chair of the UK's National Postgraduate Committee (NPC) until summer 2002.

She was then the President of Eurodoc for the year 2002-2003, helping to move the organisation from an ad hoc collection of doctoral representatives towards an effective European campaigning and consultation body. Alex has published a series of articles in the education supplement of 'The Guardian', a UK broadsheet newspaper, on the issues facing postgraduates in the Higher Education environment. Her PhD thesis in Environmental Geophysics, completed in 2003 is presently under examination by the University of Birmingham. Alex is now back in south-east England as a "Knowledge Agent" (science and technology analyst) for Dstl, a government research institute.

With a PhD from Utrecht university (The Netherlands) Frank Heemskerk led research groups in the USA (National Institutes of Health) and France (Pasteur University, Strasbourg), resulting in an academic background of 15 years in neurochemistry and pharmacology. After that he joined a small bio-pharmaceutical company in Belgium, world leader in R&D for HIV drug discovery, development and diagnostics. As Director for Research Coordination & Funding, he was responsible for the Coordination, Management and Administration of all publicly funded Research projects in the company and the external Research collaborations. In this position he supported the growth of the company from 28 to more than 250 employees over 4 years, through a merger between 2 companies, multiple private placements and finally an acquisition by a large pharmaceutical company.

He serves regularly as a consultant to the European Commission, the Flemish government and is currently President of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA). In the summer of 2002 he founded his own company (RIMS), through which he offers his expertise independently, providing various management services and training focused around industry-academic research collaborations in the Biotech/Pharma sector.

Kirstie Urquhart is European Editor of Science's Next Wave (www.nextwave.org/europe), a weekly online career development magazine for early career researchers. She has a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh. After a brief spell as a postdoc she left research to apply her research training in a communications environment, working first in public relations and then as a journalist.

Françoise Rojouan is a CNRS offficer. She obtained a PhD in physical geography from the university of Paris IV Sorbonne in 1985. Since 2001 she is in charge of the employment activity at the Association Bernard Gregory (ABG). ABG has been working for 20 years to bring together the academic and business spheres by supporting the professional mobility of new and recent PhDs into the business world.