Dr John Marks

John Marks is the Director of Science and Strategy at the European Science Foundation from January 2004. In this position he manages and has managed among others the EUROCORES and EUYRI programmes and contracts with the European Commission. From April to December 2007, he stood in as acting Chief Executive.

Before joining ESF, he was the director of Earth and Life Sciences at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. From 1981 until 1998 he worked in the Netherlands’ ministry of Education, Culture and Science in various positions in the field of Science Policy. Among others, he was responsible for the setting up of a science foresight exercise for the Netherlands government.
Between 1992 and 1993 he was acting Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, based in Stockholm. He was been involved in a wide range of science policy and management activities at the international level, both European and global, in the frame of the International Council for Science (ICSU).

John Marks holds a PhD in experimental low temperature physics from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.

Standing Committees

Gretty Mirdal

Gretty Mirdal is the Chair of the ESF Standing Committee for the Humanities (SCH). She is also Professor in transcultural clinical psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. Professor Mirdal is involved in other research administration at both national and international level. She is a member of the board of the Danish Research Foundation (Danmarks Grundforskningsfond); member of the Governing Council; member of the European Research Advisory Board to the EU; member of the Conseil scientifque du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and member of the Scientific Committee of the EFPPA (the European psychological association).

Gretty Mirdal works in two areas: the long term impact of migration and transcultural integration on mental and physical health and theory and practice in the psychological treatment of stress and chronic disease. Those two fields overlap and complement each other.

She is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.

Professor Alexandre Quintanilha

Alexandre Quintanilha, Chair of the Standing Committee for Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences (LESC), was born in Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, in 1945. He received his BSc (Hons) in theoretical physics in 1967. He completed his PhD in solid state physics in 1973 under the supervision of Frank Nabarro, one of the wold experts in dislocation theory. During 1971, ge spent a year at the University of Paris (Orsay) in the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides headed by Jacques Friedel, but associated with the group of P.G de Gennes.

Michel Mareschal

Michel Mareschal is the Chair of the ESF Standing Committee for the Physical and Engineering Sciences (PESC). He is also Professor (Chargé de Cours) in the Physics Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Head of the Physics Department. He is Director of the Laboratoire de Physiqe de la Matière Molle and FNRS representative in EUPRO (European Union of Physics Research Organisations).

Professor Mareschal was the Director of CECAM. During his time there he contributed to considerable development of the Center. He was active in widening the collaboration and managed to secure new memberships from the DFG, FORTH and the Spanish Ministry of Research.

Professor Mareschal is a frequent organiser of large reserach conferences. His most recent conference was the CCP2007 which took place in Brussels in September 2007.