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President's page#

Letter to AE and YAE members and guests from the President Sierd Cloetingh#

June 2018#

Dear AE member, member of the Young Academy and guest readers,#

Firstly, many thanks to all of our members who took the time to nominate potential new members; new members represent the evolution of our Academy expertise and representation. The 302 dossiers submitted this year are currently under evaluation by the Section committees, and their priority lists will then be discussed by Section chairs at the relevant Class meetings. This process has been designed to allow the Sections within each class to harmonize as far as is ever possible, the evaluation criteria used and best practices across similar disciplines and also to facilitate some strategic discussions on trends in disciplinary developments so that Sections can evolve and reflect the development of scholarship. The process of evaluation and preparation of final lists of new AE members will be completed by the end of July, and then, the invitation to accept membership procedure will start. This stage is managed by our Graz Data Centre team. As the new members return their acceptances, their names will be published on the www.ae-info website. If you have any questions, please direct them to your Section chair.

Related to the issue of AE nominations, I will take this opportunity to remind everyone that members of the senior academy can also nominate young scholars with potential, for consideration for election into the Young Academy of Europe (YAE). The process can be found on the YAE website and can be done at any time.

My second announcement is that the Board agreed to award Robert-Jan Smits, the former Director General of DG Research and Innovation at the European Commission, a Gold Medal of the Academy and also an honorary membership. This award has been made in recognition of his substantial and long-time support for European research excellence through the Framework and Horizon programmes, the ERC, and also through support for the COST networking scheme. His personal contribution to the development of the ERA has been substantial and a Gold Medal is a fitting tribute. The award will be presented at an event that will take place at The Royal Society in London on 24th September. A press release and the medal documentation can be found on the AE website.

The third announcement is an important date for your diaries. On November 28 – 29th we will hold our 2018 annual general meeting of members and the associated AE/YAE annual conference. The location is Barcelona. This year is the 30th anniversary year of the establishment of the AE and we are taking the opportunity to try out a new model for the annual meeting, which takes into account the time constraints that we are all now operating under. So, in the morning of 28th there will be separate concurrent meetings organised by each of our classes. On the afternoon of 28th, we will hold the formal annual business meeting of all members and we will also welcome those new members who were elected in 2017 and who will attend the meeting. In the early evening we will hold the 2018 Barcelona “Disputatio” public debate event. This has become an annual, landmark event for the Academia Europaea and for the hub in Barcelona and is always well attended. The 2018 debate topic will be ‘Cooperation vs. Competition: Challenges and Opportunities’ and the two “disputantes” are Hervé Moulin (Glasgow) and Gabrielle Demange (Paris). The full-day scientific programme will then take place on 29th November and the theme is “Building Bridges”.

I am pleased to announce that the 2018 Erasmus Medal will be awarded to Hans Clevers. He will also deliver the 2018 Erasmus lecture in the opening session. The laudation will be given by Jos van der Meer.

We are also happy that the Balzan Foundation will again be associated with our annual meeting, as we will have two former Balzan Prize winners’ keynote lectures to look forwards to. The speakers are: Carlo Ginzburg (history and also a past Erasmus Medallist) and Michael Gillon (Astronomy).

The full programme and registration will go live in a week or two from now and a specific announcement will be sent to all members.

I am personally very pleased to also announce that we will again have a full-day of geology, culture, food and wine on the 30th November with a tour to the Banyoles lake region. This excursion will be limited to a maximum of 50 people.

There have been a number of other notable developments since my last letter:

I am pleased to report that Professor Nicole Grobert (Materials science, Oxford), the former President of the Young Academy of Europe, was recently appointed to the High-level group of Chief Scientific Advisers to the European Commission (a part of the Science Advice Mechanism);

I have had the immense pleasure to recently visit the Republic of Georgia and to explore with the authorities, future opportunities for strengthening links with the academic community and European institutions. I am also happy to report that during my visit, I signed a letter of intent with our member Professor Shavardshidze (Social Sciences) who is the Rector of the Tbilisi State University of Georgia, for the establishing of a new ‘Regional Knowledge Hub’ of the AE. This development has received strong support from the government of the Republic and a new hub in Georgia will signal our intent towards the EU eastern partnership countries.

On the subject of our Regional Knowledge Hubs: In October there will be a regional members’ event organised in Wroclaw. At that meeting we will also renew our agreement with the city authorities. Wroclaw was our first Regional Knowledge Hub and was the initiative of our former President Lars Walløe (who recently celebrated his 80th birthday) and Jerzy Langer, a former trustee – this was a significant piece of foresight on their part. I am immensely grateful to the Mayor of the city - Rafal Dutkiewicz (honorary member) for his long and continuing support.

An informal tea-party event took place on 12th April at Darwin College in Cambridge. This was a small celebration for our founding President Arnold Burgen and a group of founding members. Unfortunately due to other commitments I was not able to participate, but I was pleased that both Arnold and his wife Olga (Kennard) were able to attend. The party was kindly hosted by the Master of Darwin College where Arnold had himself been the Master at the time of the establishment of the Academia Europaea. Our Vice President and Treasurer (and also himself a founder member) Ole Petersen, and the Executive Secretary, were representatives from the Board of Trustees at the event.

I have now with some deep regret to end on a very sad note. I have just learned of the recent death (on 16th of April) of Roger Elliott (Physics). Roger was a dear colleague and a wise counsellor during his years on the Board and had been an excellent Treasurer. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him and I do recall with pleasure that he was “of the old school” – a kind and remarkable man with a wealth of experience and some fascinating stories of the early days of nuclear physics working with Teller and others in the USA, and of his life as an Oxford Fellow.

Sierd Cloetingh
Utrecht, June 2018

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President's page#

Letter to AE and YAE members and guests from the President Sierd Cloetingh#

June 2018#

Dear AE member, member of the Young Academy and guest readers,#

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