Creating Now the University of Tomorrow - Looking Back to Move Ahead with Circle U. and the Alliances

Dana Samson completed her PhD in psychological sciences at UCLouvain in 2001. She worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham (2005 - 2007), as Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham (2007 - 2010) and is now Full Professor at UCLouvain where she directs research in affective and social cognitive neuroscience and teaches clinical neuropsychology. She obtained a New Investigator Award (Medical Research Council - UK) in 2005, the Elizabeth Warrington Early Career Prize (British Neuropsychological Society) in 2007, and the Francqui Professorship (Francqui Foundation - Belgium) in 2009. Since 2016, she is Pro-Rector for international affairs at UCLouvain.

Vincent Blondel (Antwerp, Belgium, 1965) is Rector of UCLouvain (Belgium). Founded in 1425, the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) is one of Europe's oldest universities. Vincent Blondel was elected Rector in 2014 and re-elected in 2019 for a 5 year mandate. Since 2017, he is also the elected Chairman of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities. Vincent Blondel holds degrees in philosophy, engineering and mathematics from the University of Louvain, and an MSc from Imperial College, London. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Oxford University, at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at INRIA Paris. He was the Kokotovic Distinguished Visiting Professor of the University California (Santa Barbara) in 2012 and was Visiting Professor as well as Fulbright Scholar at MIT in 2005 and 2010. Vincent Blondel has chaired the National Science Foundation in Belgium, the FNRS (Fund for Strategic Fundamental Research) and the Council of Rectors of the Federation Wallonia-Brussels. He was Dean of the Louvain School of Engineering and Head of the Department of Mathematical Engineering. He brought UCLouvain into the edX consortium, which offers online courses to millions of students across the world.

Vincent Blondel's research is at the interface between mathematics and information technology. He has published 6 books, and over 200 articles that have attracted more than 20.000 citations. He has supervised some thirty theses and postdoctoral projects and has coordinated an interuniversity research program grouping together more than 200 Belgian and foreign researchers. He is one of the inventors of the widely used "Louvain algorithm". He is a Fellow of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and is a member of Academia Europeae and of the Belgian Royal Academy of Science. Since his election as university president and together with his team, Vincent Blondel has developed a major strategic plan that includes an emphasis on internationalisation, sustainable development and digital developments.

Licenciée en Droit, Marketing et en Études théâtrales, Françoise Bertieaux a débuté sa carrière politique en 1983, en fondant les JRL d'Etterbeek et, ensuite, comme vice-présidente des Jeunes MR nationaux. Un engagement politique qui se poursuivra au niveau communal pendant 30 ans, en tant qu'Échevin-Officier de l'État civil de 1989 à 2012 et en tant que Présidente de CPAS de 2012 à 2019.

Élue pour la première fois députée bruxelloise et communautaire en 1999, elle assumera la fonction de Cheffe de Groupe MR au Parlement de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles de 2004 à 2019. Passionnée par les matières de l'enseignement, elle y mènera pendant ces 15 années un combat sans relâche pour un enseignement de meilleure qualité. Des valeurs qu'elle défendra également à la tête du MR bruxellois de 2007 à 2012.

Elle assumera également successivement la Présidence et la Vice-Présidence du Réseau des femmes parlementaires de l'Assemblée Parlementaire de la Francophonie.

En 2019, Françoise Bertieaux décide de se retirer de la politique pour vivre à New-York avec son mari, où elle entreprendra une seconde carrière d'artiste-peintre.

Mais en juillet 2023, à la demande de son Président de Parti, elle endosse la responsabilité de Ministre de l'enseignement supérieur, de la recherche scientifique, des hôpitaux universitaires, de l'aide à la jeunesse, des maisons de justice, de la jeunesse et de la promotion de Bruxelles. Une mission qu'elle accepte avec grand enthousiasme, retrouvant ses matières de prédilection!

Dr Manja Klemenčič researches, teaches, and advises at Harvard University, and acts as a consultant in sociology and politics of higher education.

She is editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Student Politics and Representation in Higher Education forthcoming in 2024, and co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook on Student Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education published in 2020.

This academic year, she is on sabbatical at University of Ljubljana starting a new research project on student agency in European University alliances. Manja is an award-winning teacher who won teaching excellence awards for all her courses offered at Harvard. Five times in a row, she was voted one of the most impactful professors at Harvard College. In 2020, she received the John R. Marquand Award for Excellence in Advising and Support to Students, and in 2021, she is the recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha-Iota Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Since 2014, Klemenčič serves as Editor-in-Chief of European Journal of Higher Education, since 2015, as Co-editor of book series Understanding Student Experiences in Higher Education (Bloomsbury) and from July 2022, as Co-editor of book series Higher Education Dynamics (Springer). She regularly serves as a consultant for international organizations, and governments.

Christel Vacelet has been the head of the international office of UCLouvain since 2022. Her service remit includes international students' services, mobility programmes, partnerships and projects management as well as external relations. An experienced team leader with in-depth knowledge of the European higher education & research landscape, she held various positions at the European Commission, in the Erasmus, Leonardo, and Youth Technical Assistance Office and the Education Audiovisual and Culture European Agency (Eurydice network) as well as in European Schoolnet (network of the ministries for education) and the European University Association.

Her academic career was devoted to political science and international relations at various universities: the Institut d\u2019Etude Politiques de Lyon, the Université Gustave Eiffel (France), and as an exchange student in Portland State University (USA) and the University of International Relations in Nizhny Novgorod (Russia).

Amélie Jacquemin is associate professor of entrepreneurship at the Louvain School of Management (UCLouvain, Belgium) and academic head of the incubator for student entrepreneurial projects on the FUCaM Mons campus. She holds a master's degree in law (UCLouvain, 2002) and a Ph.D. in economics and management (UCLouvain, 2012). Before joining the academic sphere, she worked in the private sector (the Brussels bar as a business lawyer) and the public one (within a political party as an advisor). Attached today to the Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organizations (LouRIM), her work focuses on entrepreneurship and SMEs, and more specifically on entrepreneurial action and education. She works as academic chair within the Circle U. InCU.bator platform. Finally, she is country Vise-President (Belgium), member of the board of directors and member of the Ethics Committee of the International French-speaking Research Association on SMEs and Entrepreneurship (AIREPME).

Prof. Dr. Marnik Vanclooster is professor and researcher at Université catholique de Louvain. He made his Ph.D. in soil physics and develops research projects in the area of water resources engineering, agricultural water management and vadose zone hydrology. His major research focus is the study of transport processes of water and chemicals from agricultural origin in the soil-water continuum. He has 28 years of experience in executing and leading research projects at the national level, at the EU level and elsewhere (in particular the Maghreb and central Africa). He is head of the Earth and Life Institute of the UCLouvain. He was elected chair of the Vadose Zone Division at the European Geophysical Union (2011-2013), was elected chair of the Belgian commission for the UNESCO - International Hydrologic Program (2013-2016), past member of the editorial board of the "Journal of Hydrology" and  the "Vadose Zone Journal", and current member of the editorial board of "Agricultural Water Management" and "Hydrology and Earth Sciences Systems Journal (HESS)\".

Tanguy is 27 and comes from France and studies international political science at the Institute of Political Science in University Paris Est Créteil. He joined the student movement in France seven years ago while attending nursing school. He advocated primarily for improving life and studying conditions of the students, at the local and national levels by working on improving the quality of internships, access to mobilty, student services. After 2 years as Board member representing french students and one year as member of the executive committee, he now serves as Vice-president of ESU. He is working on European Education Area, Internationalisation and Mobility, Youth and Sustainability.

Dr Marc Vanholsbeeck is the current head of the coordination department at BELSPO (Belgian Science Policy), in charge of the federal, interfederal and international coordination of research policies. As a former deputy Director General for research and higher education at the Ministry of Wallonia-Brussels Federation he has an extensive experience in science administration and policy making. Marc has developed a particular expertise in Open Science, having been the Chair of the ERAC standing working group on Open Science and innovation between 2019 and 2021, and in SSH (social sciences and humanities) policies, having served as Belgian first delegate to the EU Framework Programme for SSH related matters between 2011 and 2022. Marc dedicated his PhD in (science) communication studies to the topic of research evaluation in the SSH, and is still a member of ENRESSH (European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities). He is the author or co-author of several publications that relate to SSH impact, research evaluation and Open Science. Marc Vanholsbeeck is also a lecturer in science communication and research methodologies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Vanessa Debiais-Sainton is Head of the Unit in charge of European higher Education policies and programme at the European Commission's Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. The unit is the lead service for the development of the European Education Area's higher education dimension, including the European Strategy for Universities presented in January 2022. This includes the development and implementation of flagship initiatives such as: \u2018European Universities' alliances, a joint European degree, the European student card initiative, a European Approach to Micro-credentials, the automatic recognition of higher education qualifications, tracking graduates and the higher education strand of Erasmus+. In previous posts in the European Commission, Vanessa has worked in DG Research and Innovation. Before moving to the European Commission in 2006, Vanessa spent eight years working for several chemical companies.

François Heinderyckx is professor at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he teaches media studies and political communication. He is currently Advisor to the Rector of ULB for the European University Alliance CIVIS, and a member of the Steering Committee of CIVIS.

He is a member of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Translation and Communication at ULB (2015-2019), a visiting scholar at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (2019-2020) and a Chang-Jiang Scholar Professor at Communication University of China, Beijing (2013-2018). He was among the founding members of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in 2005 and was the President of ECREA from its creation until 2012. He was also the 2013-2014 President of the International Communication Association (ICA). He is the Series Editor of the Wiley Blackwell - ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication and a member of the Advisory or Editorial boards of a dozen international academic journals.

Kevin Guillaume has been Secretary General of Circle U. since September 2021. Circle U. is an inclusive, research-intensive and interdisciplinary European university alliance. The alliance consists of nine flagship universities in Europe with a shared dedication to the long-term transformational process of this unique collaboration. As Secretary General, Kevin is in charge of the day-to-day management of Circle U. legal entity and ensure the sustainable and strategic development of the alliance.

Kevin Guillaume holds a master' degree in political sciences (international relations) from UCLouvain and advanced master's degree in political economics from KU Leuven. After first professional experiences in Chile and Brazil, Kevin started his career at the Ministry for higher education and research in the French-speaking Community of Belgium. As head of unit, Kevin was mainly in charge of the follow-up and implementation of European and international policy developments in higher education, including the Bologna Process. During this period, he serves as Vice-president then President of the ENIC Network.

Kevin was then appointed director for international relations at the newly-established Academy of Research and Higher Education in the French-speaking Belgium. For the umbrella organisation representing universities, colleges and art schools, he coordinated the various initiatives, projects, actions in support of the internationalisation of those higher education institutions.

In those various positions, Kevin Guillaume has acquired extensive knowledge and experience in specific fields such as internationalisation, mobility, quality assurance, recognition, governance, etc. He has been invited as expert at several occasions by the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, EUA, EURASHE. In June 2022, Kevin was decorated Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the French Government.

Min Reuchamps is professor of political science at the Université catholique de Louvain. His teaching and research interests include federalism and multi-level governance, democratic innovations and transformations, participatory and deliberative methods, as well as relations between language(s) and politics.

He has been involved in the development of several MOOCs for the EdX platform which UCLouvain is a partner of and is an Academic chair in the European Alliance Circle U. focusing on pedagogical innovation as a member of the "Think and Do Tank on the Future of Higher Education" that will become the Circle U. Teaching and Innovations Lab (CU.til).

Sandy Tubeuf has joined UCLouvain as a professor of health economics in Sept. 2018. She was awarded the Circle U Academic Chair in Global Health in July 2021. Prior to her appointment at UCLouvain, Sandy held positions at the University of Leeds and York (UK) and IRDES (France). She received her PhD in Economics from Aix-Marseille School of Economics in 2008.

She shares her time between the Institute of Health and Society (IRSS, Faculty of Public Health) and the Institute of Economic and Social Research (IRES, LIDAM). She has built a fully new research team in health economics called ECHIL EConomics, Health, Inequalities at Louvain.

Her research portfolio includes a substantial empirical and theoretical body of work on the understanding of the determinants of health inequalities and the importance of family background, individual lifestyles and access to healthcare using survey data. She leads research work in global health and development economics working on the evaluation of healthcare policies, patients' decisions and preferences, and inequalities in low and middle income countries.

Her research has been funded by FNRS, NIHR, Leverhulme Trust, European Commission, ARES, USAID. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles.

Karel Van Acker is professor in Circular Economy at KU Leuven with a joint mandate at the the department of Materials Engineering (faculty of Engineering Sciences) and at the Centre for Economics and Corporate Sustainability (faculty of Business and Economics). His research is on developing strategies to realize the circular economy (CE) and on sustainability assessments of these CE strategies, including amongst others recycling, biobased materials, sharing economy. Karel leads the policy research centre "Circular economy" for the Flemish government and currently is the chairman of the Sustainability Council of KU Leuven. He has been involved in UNA Europe from the first days and is active member of the self-steering committee Sustainability.

Thérèse Zhang is the Deputy Director for Higher Education Policy at the European University Association (EUA). In this capacity, she contributes to develop the Association's work in areas such as learning and teaching in higher education, lifelong learning, global relations with other regions of the world, and European policy making in higher education at large.

Thérèse has been active in higher education policy/management and, more generally, project management in education and culture, for over fifteen years. Her experience covers activities in the field of quality management, institutional development, evaluation methodologies, and pedagogy.

Thérèse holds a PhD in Romance Philology and a Master in European Studies from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She completed part of her education at the University of Bologna, Italy, and at Brown University, United States.

Julie Anderson works within the European Commission's higher education policy team in DG Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. In this role, she contributes to the implementation of the European Strategy for Universities, with specific responsibility for the development of policies on environmental sustainability, quality assurance and recognition. She also acts as a contact point with Member States and stakeholders as the coordinator of the Higher Education Working Group.
 

Prior to this role, Julie worked for the Irish Department of Education and Skills, most recently as the Education and Skills Attaché in the Permanent Representation of Ireland to the EU. In this role, she was Chair of the EU's Education Committee during the Irish EU Presidency and led the negotiations with the European Parliament and the Commission on the previous Erasmus+ programme. She is also a former Vice-Chair of the OECD's Education Policy Committee.

Erlend D. Aag is a CUSU alumni from the University of Oslo. He has a master's degree in Politics, Religion, and Extremism from the University of Oslo. While serving as a student representative in the university board in 2018, he became involved in the formation of Circle U. He played a central role in the founding of Circle U. Student Union (CUSU) and have been dedicated to representing the interests of students through active participation in Work Package 1, Management Board meetings, and the General Assembly.

Liviu Matei is a higher education scholar, educator and policy entrepreneur. He holds a professorship in higher education and public policy, and is Head of the School of Education, Communication and Society at King's College London. He taught at universities in Europe and the U.S, consulted extensively in higher education and conducted applied policy research projects for the Council of Europe, the European Commission, World Bank, UNESCO, OSCE, other international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations; for national authorities and universities from Europe and Asia. He founded and directed the Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education, the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom, and the Global Teaching Fellowships Program, He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Central Asia and serves on the editorial boards of the Internationalisation of Higher Education: Policy and Practice, and the European Journal of Higher Education. His primary areas of expertise include university governance, funding, internationalization of higher education, academic freedom and university autonomy, quality assurance, and history and politics of higher education.