Julie Nutter

Julie Hagarty Nutter is the Economic Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the European Union.  Ms. Nutter is a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State.  She returned to USEU this summer from a tour as a Provincial Reconstruction Team Leader for Maysan Province in southern Iraq.  Prior to Brussels, Ms. Nutter was at the National Defense University and prior to that was the head of the Ukraine office in the State Department in the run-up to the Orange Revolution.  Her previous assignments includepostings in London, Lagos, and Monrovia during the Liberian civil war.  Ms. Nutter’s specialty in the Foreign Service is economics, with a sub-specialty in Finance and Development. She holds Master’s degree from the National Defense University in National Security Resource Strategy anda Master’sfrom Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in International Economics, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in International Politics from Georgetown.  She hails from Philadelphia and has two school-age daughters.

Diego Sammaritano holds a MA degree in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Palermo (Italy) and a second MA Degree in European Integration and Development from the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB, Belgium). In the very early stages of the Erasmus Programme (1990) he spent one semester at the then Thames Polytechnic in London (now University of Greenwich) studying marketing and international business.

After having worked for three years at the San Paolo Bank in Italy, he started his career in the European Commission in 1994 working in the Directorate General for External Relations as desk officer for trade relations with Japan. He was in charge of the Executive Training Programme in Japan and for the EU export promotion campaign Gateway to Japan. He also served in the Directorate General for Enterprises carrying responsibility for access to finance for SMEs.

Since 2003 Diego has been serving in Directorate General for Education and Culture as programme manager for education cooperation with industrialised countries. In this capacity he coordinated the EU-US and EU-Canada cooperation programmes as well as pilot projects with Japan, Australia and New Zealand. He has been in charge of the renewal of the education agreements with the U.S. and Canada. Working in close contact with the U.S. Department of Education, Diego has developed the new EU-US Atlantis programme focusing on transatlantic joint and double degrees.

Andrée Sursock is Deputy Secretary General of the European University Association, where she is responsible the institutional development area. These include the Institutional Evaluation Programme, activities to promote internal quality processes in universities, management and leadership seminars and a new project on creativity in higher education. She has participated in over 70 evaluations across Europe, prepares the quality policy positions of the EUA and is involved in the QA policy discussions at the European level.

Previous to this post, she was Director of Development at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (Open University, UK) and taught at a variety of US institutions, including the University of California (Berkeley) and Stanford University. She holds a first degree in philosophy from the Université Panthéon Sorbonne and a PhD in social/cultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 1972, Volker Gehmlich is Professor of Business Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Germany. He is course director of undergraduate and postgraduate double degree programmes. He is also the major initiator of the restructuring of the faculty and the whole institution in terms of modularisation and introduction of a credit based system that is coherent with ECTS.

Volker Gehmlich has been involved in EU-programmes since 1978, and for various functions: project co-ordinator, assessor of project applications (e.g. EU-US/ EU-CND), contributor to the design of new initiatives, evaluator and trainer of assessors, EU-expert. He is also active in the Tuning Project, and the author of various publications on the internationalisation of organisations, skill needs, and credit systems in particular.

Richard Yelland is Head of the Education Management and Infrastructure Division in the OECD Directorate for Education. This Division is responsible for the work of the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) and the Programme on Educational Building (PEB).

Richard joined OECD in 1986 from the then Department of Education and Science in the United Kingdom where he had held a range of posts in educational policy and administration since 1974. He has led PEB since 1989. Following a secondment to the University of Adelaide, South Australia, he was given the additional responsibility for IMHE in 1998. Richard has been responsible for or contributed to a range of OECD publications on higher education and educational infrastructure. He is frequently invited  to address international and national meetings on different aspects of education.

Richard is a member of the Advisory Board of the UNESCO Centre for European Higher Education (CEPES), and of the International Advisory Network for the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education in the United Kingdom. He has contributed as an international expert to the evaluation of educational institutions and programmes in Belgium and France.

Richard is 55 years old and was born and educated in England. He studied Mathematics and Religious Studies at Cambridge University.  He and his wife, Anne, have one child at secondary school in France, and two at university in England.

Daniel Obst is Director of Membership and Higher Education Services at the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York, one of the leading not-for-profit organization in the field of international educational exchange and development training.  Mr. Obst directs all the activities of the IIENetwork, the Institute’s university membership association of 900 higher education institutions around the world, is responsible for IIE’s print and online publications, conferences and seminars, and is managing editor of IIENetworker, IIE’s international education magazine.  Mr. Obst recently published Funding for United States Study: A Guide for International Students and Professionals. Mr. Obst received his B.A. in International Relations from the George Washington University and holds a Master’s degree in European Studies from the London School of Economics.