Angeliki Psychogyiou works in the ACA Secretariat as a Policy and Project Officer. She is an EU Funding and Grants specialist, with considerable experience in the Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training sectors. Her main focus within the Secretariat is digitalisation, conducting both project and policy related work in this area. She is also the co-chair of the Thematic Peer Group ‘New mobility formats’, exploring the intersection between digitalisation & sustainability. Angeliki’s main areas of professional and personal interest are international cooperation, mobility as a foster agent for European identity, digitalisation, inclusion and social responsibility of educational institutions.

Channa van der Brug is programme manager international affairs at Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (the German Forum for Higher Education in the Digital Age) at Stifterverband, where she is developing opportunities for international knowledge exchange on good practices for digital teaching and learning. She has more than 15 years’ of experience in the education sector and a passion for the role of technology in shaping the future of education, as well as for developing deeper understanding and connections between diverse people and institutions through engagement and dialogue. 

Erin Anna Smith has been working in the field of international education for over 10 years in both the USA and Czech Republic. Since 2019, she has been at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic working on summer schools, semester programmes, and virtual and blended opportunities in the EDUC Alliance.  

Evelien Renders facilitates international collaboration in higher education at SURF, the cooperative organisation for IT in Dutch education and research. Complex processes, manageable data, and interoperability between systems make her happy. She keeps track of international developments in student mobility and other logistical processes. In doing so, she contributes to flexible and agile education, both in the Netherlands and abroad. With a commitment to public values and open standards, Evelien advocates for communication, trust, and collaboration between IT stakeholders in higher education.  

Francesca Helm is associate professor of English at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padova in Italy. Her research interests are in intercultural dialogue, virtual exchange and online education, language and education policies and critical internationalization studies. She is a board member of the academic organization UNICollaboration, and was responsible for monitoring and evaluation of the European Commission's Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (EVE) project which ran from 2018 to 2020. From 2018 to 2021 she was chair of the Education Innovation Working Group of the Coimbra Group of Universities. Since 2019 she has been co-coordinator of the Italian section of the international network Scholars at Risk. 

Irina Ferencz is the Director of ACA and has been working in international higher education since 2008. Irina has a specific expertise in the area of international student and staff mobility in the European context (data collections, trends, policies), as well as in planning, monitoring and assessing internationalisation activities at institutional and national level. She also has a growing interest in widening inclusion in internationalisation activities. Currently, she is also a PhD candidate at Ghent University, CHEGG, and an occasional reviewer for two higher education journals. She has authored and co-authored multiple publications in the field. Irina holds an MSc degree in European Politics and Policies (KULeuven, Belgium) and a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and European Studies (Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Romania). She is a Romanian national, speaks several language and calls Belgium 'home'.

Juan Rayón is the president of the Erasmus Student Network. As president, he is responsible for the general coordination of the organisation, external relations, policy, and advocacy. His main priorities include increasing participation in learning mobility and fostering civic engagement and participation of young people in democratic life through the Erasmus programme. Before taking on his role as president of ESN, he was the president of ESN Spain and a Liaison Officer for Inclusive mobility of the Erasmus Student Network. He has a bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Oviedo and is currently finishing two master’s degrees in International Law and European Studies. Juan did his Erasmus exchange in Istanbul and also participated in the European Solidarity Corps in Padova, Italy, where he worked for the youth office. He is from Asturias, northern Spain.

Katrina Sproge is the vice president of ESU. She is originally from Latvia, and since 2014, she has been active in student representation on all levels, including local, national, and international ones. She was a member of the executive board of the Student Union of Latvia (LSA) from 2018 until 2021, during which time she held the positions of president and officer for international affairs. As vice-president of ESU, Katrina is working on Internationalisation and Mobility in Higher Education, Global cooperation, Sustainability, Social dimension and inclusion, as well as organisational development and capacity building.

Leona Stašová has had a pleathora of rich experiences in university education and research. She has been responsible for international relations at the University of Hradec Králové as a Vice-Rector for International Affairs since 2020. Previously, she worked as a Vice-Rector for Creative Activities, Vice-Dean for Science and Research at the Faculty of Education and Head of the Department of Social Pedagogy at the same university. She has developed various international cooperations and partnerships in her university positions and has significantly contributed to the internationalisation of university study programmes and research activities. In 2021 – 2022, she was the main coordinator of the Czech centralised development project on virtual and blended mobilities. Moreover, she has an intensive interdisciplinary background, including experience in social pedagogy and social work.

Martin Bogdan is a policy and project officer at ACA where he first started as a trainee in 2019. He has managed the CARe project, which deals with labour integration of refugee researchers in Europe, and the Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society mapping report. Before joining ACA, he completed a Blue Book Traineeship in the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission in the unit working on Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degrees. In his pre-Brussels life, Martin worked for a number of NGOs in different capacities and briefly taught social sciences and history in an international school. He has a joint MA in European studies from Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and Jagiellonian University Krakow, as well as a MA in cultural anthropology and museum studies from the University of Zagreb and a BA in anthropology and information science also from the University of Zagreb.

Michael Hörig is the Director of the DAAD Brussels Office and is responsible for representing DAAD towards the institutions of the European Union, European partner organisations and German representations in Brussels. Previously he held different positions at DAAD headquarters in Bonn, covering a broad range of topics from Strategic Planning to Develop Cooperation and Higher Education Projects in Africa and Asia. Michael studied political science and international relations at Ghent University, Belgium. He spent one year as an exchange student in Sweden at Stockholm University (Erasmus)

Piet Van Hove is President (2022-24) of the European Association for International Education (EAIE) and Senior Policy Advisor for Internationalisation at the University of Antwerp, where he previously studied Law. He has been active in internationalisation since 1995, dealing with university-wide policy formulation and execution on different aspects of internationalisation, including student and staff mobility, development cooperation, services for international staff and students, international educational projects and strategic networking. Piet has been active in the leadership of several professional associations and nonprofits at the national and international level for many years, such as Flanders Knowledge Area, ACA, the NGO APOPO and the EAIE. He presents frequently on a wide range of topics related to internationalisation of higher education. 

Regina Brautlacht is Presidential Commissioner for Global Digital Learning and a Senior Lecturer in Business Communication and Entrepreneurship, in the Office of the President and Faculty of the Language Centre at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. She has held positions at this university since 2009. Regina is also the English Language Coordinator for the Department of Management Sciences. Regina has been Appointed Presidential Member of the Commission for Teaching and Learning since 2013 and is a member of a Peer Coaching Team since 2016. She has been a founding member of the Core Team Digital Teaching since 2017.

Terhi Topi is currently an Erasmus Institutional Coordinator at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. She has been working in international education for over 25 years.  Her experience in higher education mobility includes Erasmus+ programme and grant administration, coordination of incoming and outgoing student and staff mobility, as well as partnership administration. She has also worked for a number of years as a specialist in Finnish- North American academic exchanges. 

Prof. Tomáš Skopal is currently the vice-rector for information technologies at the Charles University, Prague. His research interests include similarity search, multimedia retrieval, database indexing and video analytics. He was a (co)author of over 120 research papers and was principal investigator of multiple basic and applied research projects. Prof. Skopal serves at scientific boards at several universities, in a technical panel of Czech science foundation and at the national accreditation bureau for higher education.

Yann-Maël Bideau is a Policy Officer in the Higher Education Unit of the Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, in the European Commission. Yann-Maël is currently mainly working on the European student card initiative, the joint European degree label experimentation and micro-credentials. Before joining the European Commission in 2019, he worked as a language teacher and in the field of university cooperation. 

Dr. Wolfgang Radenbach has been Head of Digital Services for Students and Educational Staff at the University of Göttingen since 2007. His main focus is to advance the digital transformation of
all administrative processes at universities.