!!Alain Beretz

Professor Beretz is a graduate in pharmacy and holds a PhD in pharmacology. He is professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg. 
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As a professor of pharmacology, he participated in teaching of molecular pharmacology, therapeutics and haematology. His research deals with thrombotic disorders, vascular pharmacology and chronic vascular diseases 
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He was Vice-President in charge of technology transfer (2001-2006), and then President of the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg (2007-2008). 
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He was elected in January 2009 as the first president of the University of Strasbourg, born from the innovative merger of the three universities of the city, the first merger of its kind in France. He was re-elected in December 2012 for a second 4-year term. He faced the challenge of managing one of the biggest, most multidisciplinary research-intensive French universities, while at the same time implementing the new law on autonomy of universities. He is also supervised two major projects essential for the future of this institution: the “Operation campus”, where the University obtained a 375 million € endowment for improvement of campus buildings, and “Investments for the future”, and “Excellence Initiative”, a series of competitive call for projects which yielded a total of 750 million € of endowment. 
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He was, from 2014 to 2016, the Chair of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) after being a member for 3 years of its Board of Directors. LERU is a well-established network of some of the major European research-intensive universities. The League acts as a strong, outspoken voice of European research-intensive universities on a wide range of topics related to EU policies and initiatives. He has been also in 2012 president of Eucor, the European campus, an innovative trans-border alliance grouping the universities of the Rhine valley: Basel (Switzerland), Freiburg and Karlsruhe (Germany), Haute-Alsace and Strasbourg 
(France). 
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He is or has been, involved in evaluation panels of the Universities of Geneva or Bordeaux, of the EPFL Lausanne and was a member of the Swiss Accreditation Council from 2015 to 2018. From 2016 to 2018, he was Director General, Research and Innovation, at the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, with high level responsibilities on French research policies. He was from 2018 to 2020 the special envoy of the French 
Prime Minister with a mission on the “European universities initiative” of the European Commission, which are to support in bottom-up networks of universities across the EU which will enable students to obtain a degree by combining studies in several EU countries. From 2019 to 2020, he directed the Institute of Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC), a laboratory belonging to CNRS, Inserm and the University of Strasbourg, one of the largest and most successful life science institutes in France (750 people). 
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He is presently President of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST provides networking opportunities for researchers and innovators to strengthen Europe’s capacity to address scientific, technological and societal challenges. He is also President of Ksilink, a public-private Franco-German research organization, developing new drugs with patient-derived cellular disease modelling, and of IEEPI (European Institute for Entreprise and Intellectual Property) which provides training on strategic and managerial aspects of intellectual property for businesses, research organizations, universities and IP practitioners.