Speakers

Ulrich Grothus is president of ACA. Before his retirement in July 2018, he was Deputy Secretary-General and head of the Berlin office of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He obtained a master’s degree in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1976. He then worked as a journalist before joining the International Division of the former West German Rectors Conference in 1982. He worked for DAAD from 1988 through 2018, first as spokesman and head of the president’s office. From 1991, he was consecutively director of all three DAAD program directorates, for the Southern and Northern hemisphere and for supra regional internationalization programs. In between, he served as director of the Paris office from 1998 to 2000 and of the New York office from 2004 to 2008. Grothus speaks five foreign languages and has given three others a try.

Irina Ferencz (née Lungu) works for the Brussels-based Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) since 2008, currently as Deputy Director, having served in various roles previously. Through her research, publications and project management at ACA, Irina has developed a specific interest and 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 (strategic development and enhancement, KPIs, benchmarking, etc.). Currently, she is also: a PhD candidate at Ghent University, Center for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG), researching internationalisation and organisational identity in higher education; an occasional reviewer for two higher education journals; and a member of the Publications Committee of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). Irina holds an MSc degree in European Politics and Policies (KU Leuven, Belgium) and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and European Studies (Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Romania). She is a Romanian national, speaks several languages, including ‘Larish’ (a language of the under-two-year-olds), and calls Belgium ‘home’.

Vanessa Debiais-Sainton is Head of the Unit in charge of Higher Education policies and programme at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. The unit is the lead service for European policies on reform and modernisation of higher education, the new European Universities initiative, automatic mutual recognition of higher education qualifications, the EU student card initiative, and the higher education strand of Erasmus+. In previous posts in the European Commission, Vanessa has worked in DG Research and Innovation. Before moving to the European Commission in 2006, Vanessa spent eight years working for several petroleum and chemical companies.

Claire Morel is currently the Head of Unit responsible for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions at DG Education, Culture, Youth and Sport of the European Commission. She was earlier heading the unit responsible for the international dimension of the Erasmus+ programme and international policy dialogues in higher education and youth issues with various partners of the EU in the world. She has worked several years with the countries neighbouring the EU. Before that, she worked for the Tempus programme (for higher education modernisation), cooperating with Central Asian countries, and for the European Training Foundation, an agency of the EU based in Turin, on the reform of vocational education and training systems in the Eastern neighbouring countries and Central Asia.