2025 Conference speakers

Agata Gurzawska is a Research Manager at Trilateral Research, leading the Ethics, Human Rights and Emerging Technologies cluster. She coordinates the EU-funded VERITY project on trust in science and has advised on 15+ EU-funded projects on the ethical and legal aspects of technology. Her research focuses on responsible, ethical, and sustainable innovation, human rights and business, and strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Alexandra Dubini is an associate professor at the University of Cordoba and the Chair of the MCAA Sustainability Working Group. Through her work, she aims to develop new sustainable solutions for waste management and energy production, using microalgae as an ecological alternative. Her research combines basic research and biotechnological applications with the aim of applying science in the service of society.

Annelies Van de Ven is a researcher turned policy officer who is passionate about making scientific careers inclusive and impactful. Before starting at the European Commission in 2024, Annelies was engaged as a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Catholique de Louvain, where she focused on mapping the history of archaeology in Belgium in relation to the nation's international aspirations. During her postdoc, Annelies engaged in inter-sectoral work, collaborating with museums and cultural policy forums to valorise her research. She also represented the scientific community of her university, particularly working in the fields of EDI, internationalisation and parenthood.

Ashiqur Rahman is the President of the Erasmus Mundus Association (EMA), an association for the global students and alumni of Erasmus Mundus Master and Doctoral programmes. He is also the Regional Manager of Asia at the Centralised Support to the Network of Erasmus+ National Focal Points (ENFPs). He has previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (Institute for Nanoscience and Materials of Aragón at the University of Zaragoza). He completed his PhD through the MSCA ITN H2020 ED-ARCHMAT project in cotutelle with the University of Burgos, Spain, and the University of Evora, Portugal, and worked on the MSCA H2020 COFUND PhD project, Tech4Culture, at the University of Turin, Italy. He is the Chair of the Task Force on Global Mobility, Intersectionality, and Brain Circulation within the MCAA Genders, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (GEDI) Working Group.

Ashish Avasthi is an associate consultant at Nordic Innovators. Leveraging his background in nanomedicine, he consults with SMEs (primarily in the healthcare sector) to achieve excellence and EU funding. Before this, he was a bluebook trainee at the MSCA Unit of the European Commission. He is the current Chair of the MCAA Communication Working Group and an active member of the MCAA Policy Working Group. 
 

Ashwani Kumar Tiwari is working as an Assistant Professor at the School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. He is the Chair of the MCAA-Research Funding Working Group.

Aytul Erçil is the co-founder and co-CEO of Vispera and co-founder of Rebuslabs. She holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University and has worked at General Research Laboratories as a senior and staff research scientist and was a faculty member and founding director of the BUPAM Pattern Analysis and Machine Vision Laboratory at Boğazici University. She has been a faculty member and founding director of VPALAB Computer Vision and Pattern Analysis Laboratory at Sabancı University since 2001. She has directed many international projects and co-founded TOTIAD – Turkish Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Society and is an executive board member of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). She is a board member at Nobel Pharmacy, and a member of the Allianz International Advisory Board, the Swiss Innovation Valley advisory board and the joint scientific and industrial advisory board of the European Machine Vision Association. She is the founder and CEO of Vistek, which was acquired by ISRA Vision in 2013.  She is also a certified angel investor and a board member at Kagider, a women's entrepreneur organisation in Turkey.

Brian Cahill is the Managing Director of the Center for Cooperation and Career Management at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He is also a member of the Learning and Skills Analytics Group at TIB –  Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in Hannover, Germany. He was the Grant Manager of the Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO) COST Action. He is a Member of the Board of the SciLink Foundation and was previously Chair of the MCAA. In these roles, he engaged with early-career researchers on topics ranging from researcher career development, innovation, research funding, science communication, science policy, researcher pensions, research integrity, responsible research and innovation and many more. 

Camilla Scarpellini is an enthusiastic chemical biologist specialising in medicinal chemistry, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Koen Augustyns' group at the University of Antwerp. She first joined the group in 2018 as an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) and PhD candidate as part of the MSCA Doctoral Network Integrated Training in Dry Eye Disease Drug Development (IT-DED3). Her research focuses on the synthesis and biological characterisation of cell death inhibitors. During her time as an ESR, she had the opportunity to complete an academic secondment at the Applied Ophthalmology Institute (IOBA) in Valladolid, Spain, and an industrial secondment at Symeres in Nijmegen, Netherlands. She has been selected to represent the IT-DED3 ESRs consortium at various international conferences, presenting the network’s research and achievements.

Carla Molins-Pitarch is an experience designer, creative technologist, and researcher working at the intersection of design, technology, and science to bring a tangible instance to complex scientific concepts. She is a researcher at the Image Processing and Multimedia Technology Center at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-Barcelona in the DiCode: Digital Culture and Creative Technologies research group. Formerly, she was an MSCA fellow at the Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering in the ChromDesign project. She holds a PhD in science communication from the Pompeu Fabra University and was a La Caixa Fellow, receiving an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons, The New School in the United States. Her work and research have been presented and exhibited since 2013 in Spain, Finland, Switzerland, the USA, Belgium, Germany, France, Malta, and Austria.

Corinne is the Vice-Chair of the MCAA. She is a biotechnologist by training with a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Verona. In 2017, she joined the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, IT, before moving to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the US, to work on multidisciplinary projects aimed at finding new cures for neurological diseases. In 2019, she received an MSCA-GF with a project focused on elucidating the structure-function relationship of the Na-K-Cl co-transporter, a drug target for neurodevelopmental disorders. In 2021, she joined the MSCA-COFUND MINDED programme to work on the in vitro and in vivo characterisation of drug delivery nanosystems in neurodevelopmental disorders, where she is currently working. Her research field and interest focus on the use of an interdisciplinary approach (molecular biology, structural biology, computational chemistry and nanomedicine) to tackle the need for novel therapeutic treatments, especially in neuroscience. To complete her scientific profile, she also received the Prince2 certification in Project Management.

Cristina Biino is an Adjunct Full Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), passionate about fundamental physics. Throughout her career she has carried out her research within international scientific collaborations in laboratories in the United States (Fermilab) and Europe (CERN), and held roles of both scientific and managerial responsibility. She is a member of the NA62 collaboration at CERN which studies the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter and participated in the discovery of the Higgs particle with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She is the Scientific Attaché at the Italian Permanent Mission to the International Organizations in Geneva following the multilateral work at CERN, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Freedom Online Coalition (FOC), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), various Conventions (Minamata, Ramsar, Stockholm, and Basel) and many other scientific agencies of the United Nations in Geneva.

David Arranz is a physicist by training with a diverse professional background in the private and public sectors. He has worked for more than 15 years in the European Commission in different roles and policy areas. Currently, he is a policy officer in the AI in Science Unit at the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD), exploring AI's impact on science, research and innovation, making them smarter and more productive. At the moment, he coordinates the strategy for AI in science, a priority for the next Commission.

David Brena is a scientist turned scientific project manager and digital tools enabler. He holds a PhD in Biomedicine from the University of Barcelona. With over seven years of research experience in human disease modelling, gene editing, epigenetics, and oncology, he now coordinates large international consortia and institutional strategic initiatives, particularly MSCA training networks and biodiversity genomics/metagenomics/transcriptomics initiatives throughout the whole proposal and project life cycle. He is often looking for new ways of integrating Generative AI and digital project management tools into innovative research management practices.

Holding a PhD in life sciences, Eitan Segev has extensive experience in project management within multidisciplinary and international settings, collaborating with diverse stakeholders across industry, academia, and the public sector. His role in initiating, writing, and assembling proposal applications to various EU programmes has been instrumental in securing winning proposals. He has actively managed successful projects, overseeing the production of workshops and full-scale conferences. He has previously served as the Network Manager for the MSCA-ITN EpiSyStem and is currently the Project Manager for RT-SuperES, an EIC Pathfinder Open project. In collaboration with Hakim Ferria and Jonas Krebs, he co-founded the MCAA Research Management Working Group and currently serves as its Chair.

Elke Dall is a senior expert on science and innovation policy, internationalisation and science diplomacy. She studied sociology at the University of Vienna and has a background in research on networked organisations, quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and S&T and innovation policy analysis. She joined the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) in 2003 and has represented ZSI in Brussels since February 2018. Previously she has been the Head of the “Research Policy and Development” Unit and a Board Member at ZSI, and a Policy Officer focusing on stakeholder engagement at the COST Administration. At ZSI, she is deeply involved in projects funded by the European Commission related to international research and innovation cooperation. She is also the founding chair of the European Union Science Diplomacy Alliance. Currently, she coordinates the POLICY ANSWERS project focusing on R&I policy support for the Western Balkans. She has taught in several post-graduate and graduate courses, mainly about the EU RTDI funding possibilities and project management, and is involved in RTDI strategy development and policy dialogue with a focus on widening and spreading excellence.

Greta is a medicinal chemist currently completing her MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship with a secondment at Ryvu Therapeutics in Kraków. She earned her PhD at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, with research stays at Humboldt and Stony Brook Universities, and gained industrial experience at the startup FiLeClo. Since 2021, she’s been a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Koen Augustyns' group at the University of Antwerp, working on the MSCA NeuroFerro project to develop ferroptosis inhibitors for neurodegenerative diseases. She is also passionate about science communication, having participated in multiple trainings and initiatives like Pitch Your Research, Pint of Science, and being a finalist in the Falling Walls MSCA 2024 competition.

Irene Arrata is a Project Manager at Inserm’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Liver Disease (ITM), University of Strasbourg. After earning a PhD in Chemical Biology from the University of Leeds, she transitioned from academic research to innovation consulting, where she first started working with European projects. In 2020, she returned to academia as a project manager, starting with an MSCA ITN project, rediscovering her love for research, this time through research management. Since 2022, she has been actively involved in the MCAA Research Management Working Group.

Jenny Lind Elmaco is the current Chair of the MCAA Genders, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) Working Group. She works as a Key Expert in the centralised support for Erasmus+ National Focal Points of the European Commission. She is the National Contact Point for the MSCA, the European Research Council and Research Infrastructures. She is the UN Administrator for BPW International and also represents the organisation for UN Vienna and UNESCO. She is an awardee of the Global Exemplary Education Double Gold Award and the Global Exemplary Innovative Leadership Diamond Award from the Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network (GlobalWIN), UK. She is also a Marie Curie Social Impact Award and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK).  She is the founder of Girls Congress (Philippines), sits on the Board of the Association of Young Environmental Journalists, Representative of UNA Women (Austria). Her work spans science diplomacy, international development and global governance. She earned her PhD sobresaliente cum laude from Universidad Jaume I in Spain and has a Masters degree in Peace and Security (Austria), a Masters in Global Studies (Germany) and an MBA with a specialization in Big Data and Business Intelligence (Spain), and has completed an Advanced Legal Program in AI from IE University and the Executive Program on the Circular Economy and Sustainability Strategies from Cambridge University. 
 

Jose Alberto Collado Remacha is currently completing his PhD at University College London as part of the MSCA-ITN PIPGEN project under the supervision of Professor Bart Vanhaesebroeck. His research focuses on the biology of PI3Kα, with a particular emphasis on developing therapeutic strategies to target this pathway in vasculature. Beyond research, he is deeply involved in student welfare and science outreach. He played a key role in the PIPgenerating ART initiative, a collaboration between PIPGEN and the art school CSVPA that merged science and art. Currently, he is actively organising another science and art exchange programme. Alberto strives to inspire and train future generations of professionals in transdisciplinary practices.

Karen Stroobants is the Vice-Chair of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and a former MCAA Board member. She is a policy adviser and consultant on research policy and strategy, with a focus on research culture. She manages a portfolio of activities, combining roles as a part-time lead policy advisor on research landscape and economy for the Royal Society of Chemistry, the professional body for chemical scientists in the UK.

Keti Zeka is a biotechnology and medical diagnostics expert with a PhD in biotechnology from the University of L’Aquila, Italy. Her research career has spanned leading institutions, including the University of Cambridge and UCL’s Zayed Centre for Research. Her work in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and pediatric leukemic stem cells has been recognised with an MSCA fellowship and the Olivia Hodson Cancer Fund Award. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a critical role in national testing efforts as PCR Team Lead at the Cambridge COVID-19 Testing Centre and Shift Leader at Excalibur Diagnostics. She then became Head of R&D and Lab Director at EDX Medical Group. Currently, as the Research Director at Research and Product Consulting Ltd, she advises on companion diagnostics (CDx), strategic planning, and regulatory compliance.

Lisa Ginsborg is a Research Fellow at the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) based at the EUI School of Transnational Governance. She is also a Lecturer in International Human Rights at New York University (NYU) Florence. She has worked in a number of research and teaching positions in the field of international human rights law, including at University College Dublin (UCD), the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom in the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC). She previously worked in the legal department of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). She holds a PhD in Public International Law from the EUI and an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Luka Sohail currently serves as a Policy Officer for the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) at the European Commission. Previously, he was the Deputy Head of Cabinet for the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, in addition to roles at the European External Action Service and working on research policy at the Commission. Specialised in molecular microbial genetics, he received his doctorate from the University of Tennessee, the United States. He has held several academic positions in Egypt, and then in Italy as a Visiting Professor at the International Institute for Genetics and Biophysics. He has also previously worked at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in Brussels as the External Relations Manager for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Maria Rentetzi is a professor of science, technology, and gender studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research focuses on the politically and historically situated character of technoscience and on gender as a major analytic category in technoscientific endeavours. She has extensively worked on science and diplomacy, with a special focus on nuclear diplomacy. She received an ERC Consolidator research grant for her project on the role of the International Atomic Agency in the history of radiation protection. Her latest books are the co-edited volume Boxes: A Field Guide (Mattering Press, 2020), the monograph Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace (Pittsburgh University Press, 2022) and The Gender of Things: How Epistemic and Technological Objects Become Gendered (Routledge, 2024). She edits a Brepols book series on science diplomacy and the journal Almagest.

Mario Scharfbillig uses behavioural insights to improve evidence-informed policymaking and democratic processes in the EU. He is working at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, leading the Enlightenment 2.0 research programme. He is also on the advisory board of several organisations, such as the Democracy & Belonging Forum at UC Berkeley and the Science for Policy Working Group at the European Geoscience Union. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Mainz, where he specialised in research on behavioural economics and public policy and managed the Interdisciplinary Public Policy (IPP) research group. For his work on advising policymakers, he was named among the "50+1 Influential Researchers Whose Work Could Help Shape 21st Century Politicians" by Apolitical.

For over 20 years, Marta Muter has been active in international scientific cooperation with a focus on development of human resources for research and innovation, bridging gaps between science, industry and public administration. Dedicated to the EU's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), she has worked in various roles for the programme: as the National Contact Point for MSCA in her native Poland, on policy design for the European Commission and on programme implementation and feedback to policy for the Research Executive Agency (REA). In Poland, she has helped to set up the National Contact Point for Horizon Europe at the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR). Currently working at NAWA, she first headed its Departament of Programmes for Scientists and is now setting up a national network of six contact points for the MSCA in the country. She is also a member of the Horizon Europe Programme Committee, for the MSCA configuration.

Mattias Björnmalm is an experienced scientist and policy professional. He is the Secretary General of the university association CESAER and is well-versed in policy and research. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Bionics Institute and an invited member of the World Economic Forum Expert Network. His previous commitments include leading the research project qBionano at Imperial College London, being an Editor in science and policy for the journal Angle, and vice-chairing the MCAA Policy Working Group.

With a passion for connecting top talent with opportunities in biotechnology and clinical operations, Oskar Jopek specialises in crafting innovative recruitment strategies that drive success. His mission is to bridge the gap between academia and industry, ensuring that groundbreaking research translates into real-world impact through the right talent. Challenging conventional hiring practices, he embraces forward-thinking approaches to talent acquisition, leveraging cutting-edge tools, streamlining processes, and fostering collaboration between HR, marketing, and business leaders. Since 2023, he successfully placed 150 professionals across diverse fields, from bioinformatics and data science to legal, IT, and translational medicine,  reducing time-to-offer by more than 50%, ensuring an efficient and seamless hiring experience.

Pablo Emiliano Tomatis started his journey in the field of Biotechnology in 2000, completing his Master's degree. He then earned his PhD with highest honors in 2008 from the University of Rosario, Argentina. He continued his work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Rosario, under the Argentinean National Research Council. In 2012, he moved to the University of Zürich, Switzerland, where he worked as a postdoc till the end of 2015, supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship and the Novartis Foundation for Medical-Biological Research. After gaining international experience, he returned home to Argentina to contribute to the Metalloprotein Lab at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Rosario. Since last year, he has been leading as the scientific manager at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Rosario, Argentina. Dr. Tomatis also imparts knowledge as a Biophysics teacher at the School of Biochemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Rosario. As an active member of the MCAA Argentinian chapter, he’s involved in sharing chapter activities, mentoring those interested in applying to MSCA, organizing applicant workshops, and hosting international webinars. From 2017 to 2020, he served as the chair of the MCAA Argentinian chapter, and since 2020, he has been fulfilling the role of vice-chair. In 2019, he chaired the organizing committee for the 1st Latin America MCAA Meeting. He's also contributed to the organization of MCAA GA & AC in Lisbon 2022 and Cordoba 2023. Furthermore, he's part of the Management WG of MCAA.

Pavlo Bazilinskyy is an assistant professor at TU Eindhoven focusing on AI-driven interaction between automated vehicles and other road users. He finished his PhD at TU Delft in auditory feedback for automated driving as an MSCA fellow, where he also worked as a postdoc. He was the head of data research at NEXTdriver. He is currently the Treasurer of the MCAA and was a director of the Research and Innovation unit of the Erasmus Mundus Association (EMA).

Radenka Krsmanović Whiffen is a Science Officer at the COST Association -  European Cooperation in Science and Technology, based in Brussels. She obtained a PhD from the Department of Physics of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2006 for her study on luminescent nanomaterials. She subsequently worked in the fields of materials science, nanotechnology and applied physics in Italy, France, Serbia and Portugal. She is a former MSCA Individual Fellow at the ENEA Casaccia Research Centre in Rome, Italy, where she worked on her project developing ceramics for pyroelectric energy harvesting. She was the co-founder and the first Chair of the Western Balkans Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA). Her current role focuses on enhancing scientific cooperation and building networking capacities across the European research space.

Renaud Jolivet is a Full Professor at the Maastricht Centre for Systems Biology and Chair of Neural Engineering and computation at Maastricht University. He is the nominated representative for individual researchers and innovators at the European Commission’s ERA Forum, the Chair of the Science & Technology Committee of EBRAINS, the European research infrastructure for neurosciences, and holds a courtesy appointment at CERN, the particle physics laboratory.

Sabina Cveček is the MCAA North America Chapter Chair and an MSCA Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her research focuses on contextualizing prehistoric households, kinship, and social organization in the eastern Mediterranean from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. She earned her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Vienna in 2021. She received a City of Vienna Promotion Award in the category of Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Studies, and Law in 2023. She is the author of “Çukuriçi Höyük 4: Household Economics in the Early Bronze Age Aegean” (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press) and a co-editor of “The Seasonal and the Material: Anthropology of Seasonal Practices” (Anthropos). She is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and co-chair of the “Archaeology and Gender in Europe” network of the European Association of Archaeologists. 

Subhra is the chief editor of Nature Portfolio and Nature India, as well as their globally supported projects. She has been a science journalist for over 25 years and won several accolades, such as Robert Bosch Fellowship and the Kavli Prize media scholarship. She is also a member of the selection committee of the World Conference of Science Journalists, and she has a long history of providing training to scientists, healthcare professionals and journalists in science and health communication. 

Theodoros Staikos works as a Research Programme Administrator and Call Coordinator for the Postdoctoral Fellowships (PF) programme within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) at the European Research Executive Agency (REA). He began his career as a mechanical engineer at Intrakat S.A. and later served as a Head of Unit at the Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas (FORTH) in Greece. He holds a PhD in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from Loughborough University, United Kingdom.

Theodota Lagouri is the Chair of the MCAA Policy Working Group and a Senior Research Scientist at CERN, affiliated with Yale University. With extensive experience in particle physics and high-energy collider experiments, she has significantly contributed to scientific research and international collaboration. As an active member of the MCAA and the EU Science Diplomacy Alliance, she advocates for science policy and diplomacy, fostering responsible research and inclusive innovation worldwide.