Ludovic Thilly is Full Professor of Physics at the University of Poitiers and, since 2012, Vice-Rector in charge of European Strategy and EC2U Alliance. Member of the Coimbra Group Executive Board since 2015, he was elected Chair in June 2017 and re-elected twice since then. His current mandate goes until 2028.
Professor Thilly is Coordinator General of the EC2U European University Alliance and co-coordinator of FOREU4ALL, the community of practice of the 65 selected Alliances. Professor Thilly is still teaching and supervising PhD students. In his research, he works on the deformation mechanisms of (nano-)materials. He has co-authored 80+ publications in international peer-reviewed journals (incl. 4 book chapters) and given 60+ invited lectures at international conferences and institutions.
Beatrix Busse is Professor of English Linguistics and the Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Teaching at the University of Cologne. From 2011 to 2019 she held the Chair of English Linguistics at Heidelberg University where she was appointed as Vice-Rector for Teaching and Student Affairs twice, from 2013 to 2019. Beatrix Busse has a broad range of research interests that include stylistics, corpus linguistics, history of English and historical pragmatics, socio-linguistics, language in urban space with a focus on Brooklyn, New York, and transfer linguistics.
Beatrix Busse is part of the steering committee and the person responsible on behalf of the University of Cologne for the EUniWell Alliance – the European University for Well-Being.
Daniel Donoghue is Professor in the Department of Geography, Co-director of Durham University Institute for Data Science at Durham University. He recently served as University Dean for Internationalisation and as Deputy Head of Faculty in the Faculty of Social Sciences & Health. He has published over 100 articles and books and pursued research in the field of deforestation and forest degradation, land use change and archaeology. In 2009 he shared the Talbert Abrams and the ERDAS awards for the best paper in remote sensing from ASPRS, and in 2012 was awarded the President’s Prize by the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society.
Antonella Forlino is full Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pavia. She teaches in the Degree Course in Medicine and Surgery (in the Harvey and Golgi Courses) and in the Degree Course in Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. Since 2019 she is Pro Rector for Internationalization and President of the Center for Global Strategic Engagement (GLOBEC) of the University of Pavia. She is also the person responsible for the European University Alliance EC2U (European Campus of City-Universities) at the University of Pavia. She is coordinator of research projects funded by national and international agencies. For years she has been studying the biochemical and molecular basis of hereditary bone diseases with a translational approach.
Dorota Malec is the Jagiellonian University Vice-Rector for International Relations, a lawyer, professor of jurisprudence, and former Vice-Dean of the JU Faculty of Law and Administration (2008-2016) and JU Vice-Rector for University Development (2016-2020). She chairs the JU Department of Administrative History and Thought and JU Source Text Publishing Unit. She is a member of the International Affairs Committee of the Conference of Rectors in Poland, and former Disciplinary Spokesperson of the General Council of Higher Education. She teaches and publishes in legal history, history of administration, law codification and is the author and co-author of about 160 publications.
Coco Norén is Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University and Professor of French. She is the former Dean of the Faculty of Languages (2014-2020). After receiving her PhD in 1999, she was a Pro Futura Fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies (2002-2008) and an Academy Research Fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (2008-2013). In 2015 she was elected a member of the Research Leads Group in the Matariki Network (2015-2020) and she chairs Uppsala University’s Steering Committee for ENLIGHT, a European University Alliance, since 2021. Her field of research is argumentation, text linguistics and polyphony in modern French, in particular European parliamentary discourse and spoken practices. She joined the Executive Board in June 2021.
João Ramalho-Santos is Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Coimbra. Full Professor at the Department of Life Sciences, he teaches and researches Development, Reproduction, Metabolism, Bioethics, Biomedicine and Science Communication. He is a reviewer and editor for over 100 scientific journals and international agencies and has (co-)authored over 200 scientific publications. His h-index is 42 (ISI), and he was recently considered one of the top 2% of influential researchers worldwide. He is the co-author of several comic books or comic book related works for both research purposes and scientific dissemination in partnership with the newspaper “PÚBLICO” or with the national agency for science outreach “Ciência Viva”.
Eva Voldřichová Beránková is Full Professor of Romance literatures and Vice-Rector for International Affairs at Charles University (Prague). For nearly twenty years, she has directed the French Department of the Institute of Romance Studies and from 2014-2018 she was Vice-Dean for International Affairs at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. As a graduate of Sorbonne University, she specializes in French literature from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary theory, the history of film, and the Francophone Quebec novel. She has published four monographs, more than twenty collective monographs, many chapters of books and articles in international scientific journals. She is currently the key manager of two major European projects targeting collective security.
In terms of international cooperation, she has been very actively involved in the inter-university alliance 4EU+ since 2018. She was at the origin of cooperation with the main strategic partners of Charles University. Since taking up her position, she has also coordinated activities aimed at assisting Ukrainian universities in the field of research, development and European funding. Eva Voldřichová Beránková was elected on the Executive Board in June 2024.
Efrem Yildiz Sadak is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Philology, Department of Hebrew and Aramaic Studies, of the University of Salamanca. He is specialised in Aramaic history, language and literature. He is a member of the Commission of the Degree in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies. He is a committee member of several scientific journals, the (co-)author of books and articles in journals on Aramaic language, literature, history and culture of the Aramaic-speaking peoples. Prof Yildiz served as Vice-Rector for International Relations at the University of Salamanca from 2017 to 2022.