9. October 2006 11:00
Asia recruits ESF top science manager Bertil Andersson
Asia recruits ESF top science manager Bertil Andersson
The European Science Foundation today announced the resignation of its Chief Executive, Professor Bertil Andersson, to take effect from 1 April 2007. Professor Andersson will continue to lead ESF until that time.
Professor Andersson is leaving the ESF to take up the post of Rector of the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.
Professor Andersson said, in his letters to staff and to the ESF Member Organisations and Governing Council, “It is with some ambivalence that I announce my resignation but the Nanyang Technological University represents a new and very different challenge but also, in some way, a return to my roots in academia.
Under the leadership of the current President, Ian Halliday, ESF is well on track to becoming one of the key players in the European Research Area. Over the past few years, ESF has not only become a vastly more professional organisation attracting the best brains in Europe to take part in its activities and in attracting extremely able staff from across Europe but it is now a significant contractor to the European Commission and has promoted many new initiatives and also managed programmes on behalf of others. I am especially proud of the work which ESF has done in establishing the EURYI scheme for young researchers, for the EUROCORES scheme which brings cooperative funding together at a European level, for the EuroBioFund which brings academia and industry together in the life sciences, for the reinvigorated Research Conference scheme, so strongly supported by the research community and by our many funding partners, and for its support of the COST system and the development of a close working synergy between the two pre-eminent research networking activities in Europe. From my new perspective in Asia, I shall follow the developments of the ERA and , of course, the continued strong progress of the ESF, and I hope that I can assist in developing new ties between Singaporean and European researchers, especially through ESF and COST.
In a comment, ESF President Professor Ian Halliday thanked Professor Andersson for his major contribution to the development of ESF. He said “Bertil Andersson has led by example, not sparing himself, to develop and increase the role of ESF. We owe him a debt of gratitude for all his efforts, especially in establishing ESF in the ERA and in developing its instruments in such a way that they will continue to develop into the future. His commitment to excellence both in recruiting the staff who serve the Foundation but also in terms of the high quality peer review, which now runs right through the Foundation, reflects his own research career and ideals”.
ESF will shortly commence the process for the appointment of a successor to Bertil Andersson.
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