Freddy Weima

Freddy Weima (1971) took up the position of Director-General of Nuffic on 5 November 2012.

From 2007 he worked at the Labour Market unit of the CAOP – the knowledge and services centre for labour issues in the public domain – and within this position he also directed the centre of expertise for the educational labour market, SBO (Sectorbestuur Onderwijsarbeidsmarkt). He was also secretary of the Education Foundation (Stichting van het Onderwijs) and of the Labour Market Platform for Primary Education (Arbeidsmarktplatform Primair Onderwijs). Besides this, he was involved in various policy development programmes for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

From 2011 until his appointment at Nuffic, he was coordinator of the Dutch Knowledge and Innovation Agenda (KIA). The KIA draws up an agenda for and monitors the position of the Dutch knowledge economy in the world.

Freddy Weima studied political science at the University of Amsterdam and the San Francisco State University. He started his career as a political science lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, after which he joined the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in 1997 as a policy assistant. His activities at the Ministry included working for the then University Education Directorate and the department’s strategic division. Weima subsequently worked for the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment and for the National Agency of Correctional Institutions (DJI) of the Ministry of Justice. At the DJI, his positions included head of the Policy Development department under the Implementation Policy Group Staff (Concernstaf Uitvoeringsbeleid).

Throughout his professional career, Freddy Weima has always sought to contribute to the public interest. In recent years whilst working at the CAOP, he focused particularly on the public sector labour market. As Director-General of Nuffic, he will now be directing his efforts towards the internationalisation of higher education.

Bernd Wächter is the Director of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). He studied at the universities of Hull (UK), Giessen and Marburg (Germany). His career has been focused on international higher education. He worked for the University of Kassel, the British Council, and the Fachhochschule Darmstadt, before joining The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as the head of their EU division. He subsequently became the director for Higher Education (Erasmus) in the Brussels Socrates Office. In 1998, he took up his present post as ACA Director.

Bernd Wächter has published and lectured widely on international higher education. He is the editor of the ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education. He has been the team leader of ACA’s research projects and speaks frequently at major governmental and stakeholder conferences, in Europe and beyond, on the issue of mobility and internationalisation.  

Bernd Wächter has two children. He is married to Thora Magnusdottir, a delightful lady from Iceland.

Sijbolt Noorda is President of the Academic Cooperation Association, Brussels. He is a former president of the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Association of Universities. He is a graduate of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universiteit Utrecht and Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University New York.

He served and serves on various boards of institutions for health care, public broadcasting, fine arts and culture, information technology, publishing, university quality assessment and civic development.

In Germany he is a member of Akkreditierungsrat. He is an advisor to universities in Austria, Germany, Holland, Romenia and Turkey, and lectures and writes on European cultural history, university strategies, international cooperation and educational policy.

Kathleen van Heule is Head of the International Relations Office at University College Ghent. She has been in this position since February 2012 and prior to this she has worked as Staff Officer International Relations at the same institution since September 2000. Kathleen has an educational background in educational sciences and educational psychology and has worked as a researcher at the Department of Educational Studies of Ghent University for 10 years.

At present, her main tasks consist of the management and promotion of internationalisation in higher education, promoting participation in European programmes, stimulating international mobility of students, staff and alumni, implementing quality assurance of internationalisation, and developing the internationalisation policy at University College Ghent.

Kathleen participates in various organisations regarding internationalisation and higher education. She is an elected member of the EAIE Board and vice-president of Flanders Knowledge Area vzw.

Adam is Head of Higher Education, Modernisation Agenda and Erasmus at the Directorate General for Education and Culture at the European Commission. He is responsible for developing EU higher education policies, overseeing the implementation of the Erasmus strand of the Lifelong Learning Programme and preparing proposals for the future.

In his previous post as Head of Policy and Interinstitutional Coordination, he was responsible for overseeing the development of policy in all areas covered by DG Education and Culture and for ensuring good relations with the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the other EU Institutions.

In previous posts in the Commission, Adam has worked on issues such as combating poverty and social exclusion, fighting discrimination on a wide range of grounds and been responsible for Communication and Speechwriting for the Commissioners for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. Before moving to the Commission, Adam spent ten years in Brussels working for the UK Government in the fields of labour and social affairs.

Peter Greisler studied law in Erlangen and Mainz (Germany) and in France and Great Britain.

He started his professional career at the then Federal Ministry for Research and Technology in 1991, where he worked in different areas ranging from international nuclear energy policy and other international affairs to staff, cabinet and parliamentary issues and research for sustainability, science and society.

He has been Head of the BMBF’s Higher Education Directorate since 2004. His responsibilities include the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), higher education legislation, social issues regarding university studies (BAföG training assistance), the promotion of young researchers, the internationalization of universities and continuing education at higher education institutions.

Irina Ferencz is Policy Officer at the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). Since her start at ACA, in 2008, she has been mainly involved in projects and activities related to the use of indicators for measuring internationalisation at university level and has authored several publications and articles on international student mobility, on both statistical and policy trends. Examples of recent publications she co-authored are the studies “Mapping mobility in European higher education” (previously referred to as EURODATA II) of 2011 and the 2012 “European and national policies for academic mobility. Linking rhetoric, practice and mobility trends”. Currently, Irina coordinates the MOWIN Project at ACA – which aims to generate a typology of “mobility windows” and practical examples in the European context. Over time, Irina has also been in charge of the development of several ACA European Policy Seminars, and constantly represents the association externally, at various international conferences and other events.

Irina, who is a Romanian national, studied International Relations and European Studies at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and obtained a Master’s degree in European Politics and Policies at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kassel, Germany.

Carla Kist is Exchange Officer since 2008 at University College Utrecht (UCU), the honors undergraduate Liberal Arts and Science program of Utrecht University. She coordinates 40 exchange programs of UCU, with universities all over the world. Carla is also working for the University of California, being the Academic Coordinator of Californian exchange students studying in the Netherlands at Maastricht University and Utrecht University (UU).

She has more than 20 years of experience in Internationalization of Higher Education and has also worked at VU University Amsterdam; Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain; University of Gent, Belgium; Erasmus Bureau in Brussels and University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. Carla was a study abroad student in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (1981-1982) and obtained a Master’s degree in Human Geography (UU 1983).

Kristina Hauschildt joined the HIS-Institute for Research on Higher Education as a researcher in 2011. Her main areas of work include the evaluation of policy and practice in various areas of higher education, ranging from student drop-out to the impact of student fees on the quality of higher education provision. She was part of the TRACKIT project, which compared European practices of student and graduate tracking. Currently, she is involved in the MOWIN project, which examines different implementations of mobility windows in study programmes in several countries.

In 2010 Kristina was awarded a doctorate in work and organizational psychology from the University of Kiel, Germany. She graduated from the same university with a diploma in psychology in 2007. During her studies, she spent periods of her research at universities in the UK and Portugal.

Since 1972, Volker Gehmlich is Professor of Business Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Germany. He was course director of undergraduate and postgraduate double degree programmes. As a Bologna-Promoter he has been the major initiator of the restructuring of the institution in terms of modularising study-programmes, introducing ECTS and defining a grid of learning outcomes for bachelor and master students.

Volker Gehmlich has been involved in EU-programmes since 1978 in various functions: project co-ordinator, assessor of project applications, contributor to the design of new EU initiatives, evaluator and trainer of assessors, EU-programme-expert. His network was awarded the ERASMUS-Prize in 1991. He was involved in the design of both the European and German Qualifications Framework for LLL and the German Framework for HEA. He also worked in the Technical Assistance Office of the COMETT-Programme (1987-1995), is active in the Tuning Project, is the ECTS National Contact Point for Germany, and the author of various publications on the internationalisation of organisations, skill needs, learning outcomes and credit systems and published a study on the potential introduction of a German Qualifications Framework for LLL. He has run a TOEIC test centre for many years and has been involved in comparing the European Competence Framework with TOEIC and TOEFL levels and is a member of the GRE European Advisory Council.

Volker Gehmlich participated as an expert in the Australia-European Union Roundtable on Education and Training in 1996 and 2009. In 2000 he was awarded the “Prize for excellence in international cooperation of higher education“ by the German Minister for Education and Research and in 2012 the “ERASMUS Individual Prize of the DAAD”.

Nino Chinchaladze is the executive Director of the Center for International Education in Tbilisi, Georgia. Nino’s main duties are to manage the Center for International Education, to organize education fairs,  advise students and professionals on study abroad opportunities, support them  to find appropriate universities and schools,  works with different  education organizations worldwide, CIE has well developed network of advising centers in Georgia. The Center works with the Open Society Foundations Scholarships program and is  the part of  EducationUSA network.

Nino Participates in Conferences and workshops like NAFSA,  EAIE, US State Department Training Programs. Nino Chinchaladze has Phd in Ethnography. She got her degree in Leningrad, graduated from Tbilisi State University. She was the senior researcher at the Institute of History and Ethnography in Georgian Academy of Sciences.

Jeroen Torenbeek is currently Director of the Utrecht University Summer School. Jeroen studied History and Italian Language at Utrecht University, and bassoon at the conservatory.

Jeroen has been involved in international relations since 1986, and was director of the University’s International Relations Office for 15 years. In that period he was founder and chairman of the Utrecht Network, Interim director and later President of the EAIE, and chair of numerous foundations and committees.

Since 2005 Jeroen focuses on the Utrecht Summer School; the last seven years this Summer School increased from 300 to 3.000 international students.

He wrote a number of articles on internationalisation, and is the editor of the first volume of the EAIE Professional Development Series for International Educators, Managing an international office, and editor / author of the last one: International Summer Schools.

Christian Bode was Secretary General of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for 20 years (1990-2010). He was educated in law and received his PhD from the University of Bonn in 1971. Between 1972 and 1982 he held different senior positions in the Federal Ministry of Education and Science. From 1982 until 1990 he was Secretary General of the ( then West-) German Rectors` Conference. He was one of the founders of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) in Brussels and was its Vice President for several times.

Christian Bode has published widely on all aspects of higher education policy, with a special focus on internationalization. He is a member of several administrative boards and professional societies – inter alia the “EU High level Group on Modernization of Higher Education in Europe”and was rewarded several honorary doctorates and numerous other distinctions including OBE (UK), „Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite“ (F), the Cassandra Pyle Award (NAFSA, USA) and the Constance Meldrum Award of the European Association for International Education (EAIE).

Peter Scott is Professor of Higher Education Studies at the Institute of Education University of London. He is also Chair of the Council of the University of Gloucestershire, Chair of the Behavioural Sciences section of the Academia Europaea and a member of the Council of the Magna Charta Observatory.

He was President of the Academic Cooperation Association from 2000 until 2008 [NB maybe you should check this], and Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University London from 1998 until 2010. He has been a member of the Board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Chair of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning in the United Kingdom. He was the general rapporteur of a conference of European higher education researchers held in Bucharest in 2011 as a preliminary to the Bologna Ministers’ meeting in the same city last year, at which he presented a summary of the research evidence on recent developments in European higher education. He is also the author of several books on mass higher education, the globalisation of higher education and the development of new forms of knowledge production.

Jet Bussemaker is the Minister for Education, responsible for higher education.

She obtained a master’s degree in Political Science in 1986 and a doctor’s degree in Social Science in 1993 at the University of Amsterdam. She then worked as a policy officer at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, where she was involved in promoting research in women’s studies. Since 1998 she became a member of the House of Representatives for the Labour Party (PvdA). Her portfolio included social affairs and tax policy. In 2007 she was appointed State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport in the fourth Balkenende government.

After serving as State Secretary, she joined the Executive Board of the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in march 2011. She has also been a crown-appointed member of the Social and Economic Council (SER). On 5 November 2012 Dr Bussemaker was appointed Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Rutte-Asscher government.

Hanneke Teekens is member of the board of directors of Nuffic (the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education). Nuffic is an independent, non-profit organization based in The Hague. Nuffic supports internationalization in higher education, research and professional education in the Netherlands and abroad, and helps to improve access to higher education world wide. Within Nuffic Hanneke Teekens is responsible for the directorate Information Services, overseeing all aspects of communications, including the Netherlands education support offices  in ten different countries(Neso’s).

Currently Teekens is chair of the board of the Association for Studies in International Education (ASIE), a group of organizations whose mission is to encourage international education and research and who publishes the Journal of Studies in International Education.

Hanneke Teekens studied education and history and did her post-graduate studies at the University of Leiden. She was an exchange student to the US.

Jeanine Gregersen-Hermans is the director for Student Recruitment at the University of Hull in the UK. Previously Jeanine worked at Maastricht University, Netherlands as the director of Marketing and Communications and Spokesperson of the Executive Board. In this capacity she is also was appointed as a director of Maastricht Education and Research center pt. Ltd. Bangalore, India.

Internationalization of higher education forms a red line in Jeanine’s professional life. She has worked in areas as advising international students; intercultural competence building and teaching in the international classroom; marketing and recruitment of international students.

Jeanine has published and taught on topics of intercultural communication and marketing of higher education. She is member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Studies in International Education (JSIE). Currently she serves as a member of the General Council of the EAIE. Jeanine has been awarded the official status of EAIE senior trainer and is a member of the professional development committee of the EAIE.

In 2008 Jeanine received the Bo Gregersen Award for Best Practice for an innovative contribution to international education of the European Association of International Education. In June 2011 Jeanine has been appointed Honorary Member of the IROICA network, the standing committee for internationalization of ICA, the European Association of Life Science universities.

Jeanine is a certified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) since 2002; and a certified administrator of the Global Competency Inventory (GCI) and the Intercultural Effectiveness Survey (IES), Kozai group since 2012.

Jeanine studied Clinical Psychology holds a post graduate degree in Psychology of Radboud University, Netherlands, and graduated in 1984. Until 1997 Jeanine worked as dean for international students at Wageningen University, Netherlands. After a period as secretary general of the UNICA university network in Brussels, from 2000 to 2005 she took up the position of head of educational marketing at Wageningen.

With a background in languages (English and German) and the experience of 4 years as dean and 8 years as vice-rector with special responsibility for international affairs at the then Aarhus School of Business, Karen M. Lauridsen now works at Aarhus University, Centre for Teaching and Learning. In her research and in-service training programmes, she particularly focuses on issues related to teaching and learning through the medium of English in the multilingual and multicultural learning space and to language policy.

KML is the coordinator of the Erasmus Academic Network IntlUni – The Challenges of the Multilingual and Multicultural Learning Space in the International University (2012-15).

Aarhus University was instrumental in establishing the European Language Council, and KML has served on the Board of the ELC since the association was launched in 1997.

For more information, please see here.

Karina Ufert is a Chairperson of European Students’ Union for academic year 2012/ 2013, previously she has served as an Executive Committee member (2010/11) and a Vice-Chairperson for ESU (2011/12). Karina is responsible for overall ESU policy and advocacy coordination. She is also co-chairing Bologna Follow-up Group for Social Dimension and Lifelong learning (2012-15) and elected member of the Bureau of a Steering Committee on Educational Policies and Practices of the Council of Europe.

Karina has a broad experience in institutional governance and quality management, she has been a member of a management group at her home institution (Vilnius University), later joined a number of institutional reviews with European University Association, Irish Universities Quality Board and other. Currently Karina is involved in the drafting group for revising the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG) for Quality assurance.

Uwe Brandenburg is project manager at CHE Consult and an expert on strategic development, internal communication and internal project quality assurance. He was the head of CHE Excellence Ranking (a pan-European quality assessment project of Master’s programmes), project coordinator of the IMPI project (Indicators for Mapping and Profiling Internationalisation), and leads a number of advisory projects in the fields of internationalisation, controlling, strategy development, organisation development, diversity management, benchmarking, and quality control. He has published on financing models for studying abroad, international education systems (inter alia on China with more than 53,000 downloads to date), foreign marketing, internationalisation, EU projects regarding benchmarking, internationalisation, and Change Management at European universities. He has cooperated in the International Deans’ Course for further education and training of deans from developing countries, and is a member of the Deutsche Assoziation für Internationalen Bildungsaustausch (DAIA) e.V. (German Association for International Exchange of Education) (Chairman until 2006), European Association for International Educators (EAIE), Fulbright Alumni e. V., and CHER (Consortium of Higher Education Researchers). He has been invited as core expert to the IAU (International Association of Universities) and to the Ad Hoc expert group on internationalisation.

Neil Kemp has contributed to a range of education and training projects in over twenty countries and has lived and worked for long periods in South and East Asia, including eight years each in Indonesia and India (Kolkata and New Delhi). Neil studied physical sciences for his first degree and obtained a PhD in electron spectroscopy from Swansea University. After working in Asia he decided to explore international education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

He currently manages his own international education consultancy and clients include over forty UK and international universities, a number of governments and other organisations. Neil is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London, where his research interests concern international higher education policy and their implications; transnational education (TNE); international student mobility and private sector involvement. His main country interests relate to Indian and Malaysian HE policy and developments and he was responsible for developing the UK-India Education and Research Initiative. Neil is also a board member of the Council for Education in the Commonwealth and Open University Worldwide.

Queenie Lam joined ACA as Project Officer in late 2010. Since then, she has been involved in a number of research projects and the production of ACA events and monthly newsletter. Currently, she is involved in two ACA-led projects: STiME (on assessing the contribution of national grants and loans to student mobility in Europe) and MOWIN (on mapping “mobility windows” in European higher education), and an Erasmus Mundus project, EduCoach, which strives to develop an online student advising tool for European higher education.

Queenie started her career as Executive Officer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2004-08), where she was first involved in the international recruitment of academic staff, and later in the development of international academic partnerships. Before joining ACA, her immediate past position was Research Assistant at the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) and the International Study Center of the University of Kassel.

Queenie holds an MA in International Higher Education Research and Development from INCHER, Kassel (2012) and an MPhil in Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006). Her short-term mobility experiences include a year in Georgetown University as an exchange student (2000/01) and a month as a participant in Kassel’s International Summer University (June 2002).

Robert John Coelen is Vice-President International at Stenden University in the Netherlands. Prior to this appointment he was Vice-President International at Leiden University. He has worked for about 15 years in the field of international education. He returned to work in Europe after an absence of 30 years. Most of these 30 years were spent in Australia. During his time in Australia he spent about 5 years altogether in South-East Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Dr Coelen is a member of Club33, a global think tank on internationalisation, a member of the International Ranking Experts Group, which produced the Berlin Principles on Ranking in Higher Education. He regularly reviews papers for the Journal of Studies in International Education.

Ulrich Teichler has been a Professor at the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER-Kassel), University of Kassel (Germany), since 1978. He also served as director of the Centre for 16 years.

Born in 1942, Prof Teichler has a diploma and doctoral degree in sociology. He was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin, and has done extensive research in Japan, The Netherlands, and the US. Prof Teichler has been a part-time or visiting professor at Northwestern University, the College of Europe, Hiroshima University, and the Open University (UK). His research focuses on higher education and the world of work, comparison of higher education systems, and international mobility. He has authored or co-authored more than 1,000 publications.

Prof Teichler is a member of the International Academy of Education and the Academia Europea. He has been the president or chair of many international research networks, including the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers and EAIR (where he is also a distinguished member). Prof Teichler has received the Comenius Prize of UNESCO and Dr. h.c. of the University of Turku.

Ulrich Grothus (b. 1952) is the Deputy Secretary-General, Director for Strategy and Head of the Berlin Office of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). 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. Starting in 1991, he has been 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. Since 2010, he has been a member of ACA’s Administrative Council; in December 2011 he was elected Vice-President.