Richard Yelland is Head of the Education Management and Infrastructure Division in the OECD Directorate for Education. This Division is responsible for the work of the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) and the Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE), formerly known as the Programme on Educational Buildings (PEB). Richard Yelland joined the OECD in 1986 from the Department of Education and Science in the United Kingdom, where he had held a range of posts in educational policy and administration since 1974. He has led IMHE since 1998. Richard Yelland has been responsible for and has contributed to a range of OECD publications on higher education and educational infrastructure. He is frequently invited to address international and national meetings on different aspects of education. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the UNESCO Centre for European Higher Education (CEPES), and of the International Advisory Network for the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education in the United Kingdom. He has contributed as an international expert to the evaluation of educational institutions and programmes in Belgium and France and in 2009 in Iceland. In 2006 he coordinated the review of Varmland (Sweden) in the first round of OECD reviews of higher education in regional development.
Patrick Dubarle, former Principal Administrator at the OECD Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate (GOV), has co- ordinated and contributed to a number of OECD territorial reviews at the national and regional level and has recently participated in the regional innovation reviews in Italy and Mexico. In 2004-2007 he represented GOV in the OECD project on supporting the Contribution of Higher Education Institutions to Regional Development and coordinated the review of the
horizontal programmes. He has worked with national governments in many OECD countries and has spoken at several international conferences. He is the author of documents on high technology policies and sectoral questions including space industry, technological change, technology fusion, innovation and higher education in regional development.
Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen has been the Rector of Aarhus University (AU) since 2005. Additionally he is Chairman of the Nordic University Association, Vice-Chairman of Universities Denmark, Board Member of the European University Association (EUA) and Euroscience. Furthermore Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen is a member of the National Growth Forum hosted by the Danish Prime Minister and has been a member of the Prime Minister’s Africa Commission, Board Member of the Danish National Research Foundation, Rector of the Danish Research Academy, Vice- Chairman of the Danish Research Commission, Chairman of the Danish Natural Science Research Council and the Danish Council for Development Research. Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen has a degree in Botany from AU (1971) and was Dean of the Faculty of Science at AU (1976-79) before he became professor at P. Universidad Católica, Quito, Ecuador (1979-81). Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen has spent 18 years working abroad, 12 of these at the World Bank in Washington D.C. (1993-2005) where he formulated strategies for further education, training and research, and managed the planning and implementation of higher education sector investments in a wide range of emerging countries – most recently Columbia, Chile and Mexico. He has also published many papers on higher education, science and technology, innovation and globalisation. His latest publication (2010) concerns the mobility of talent.
Kristopher Olds is Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin- Madison, USA. His BA (Human Geography, 1986) and MA (Community and Regional Planning, 1988) are from the University of British Columbia in Canada, while his PhD (Human Geography, 1996) is from the University of Bristol in England. He has worked in England, Canada, Singapore (1997- 2001), and the United States (2001 to present). He was based at Sciences Po in Paris during his 2007-2008 sabbatical year. Kris Olds’ research focuses on the globalization of the services industries (including education, architecture, property), and their relationship to urban and regional development processes. His current research projects focus on the emergence of Singapore as a ‘global education hub’, and the global geopolitics and geo-economics and higher education and research. Kris teaches interdisciplinary-oriented courses in economic and urban geography, and plays an active role in regional and international initiatives and centres at UW-Madison, including coordination of Madison’s engagement with the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN). He is co-editor of the
GlobalHigherEd weblog and author of numerous articles and chapters, as well as several books.
Véronique C.M. Timmerhuis is Secretary-General of the Social and Economic Council (SER), the main advisory body to the Dutch government and the parliament on national and international social and economic policy. She studied Sociology (focusing on social-economic policy and economic sociology) and History (focusing on the history of industrialised societies) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. From 1989 to 1998, she worked as a researcher for IVA, the institute for policy research and advice of Tilburg University, where she gained her PhD with a thesis entitled Research
organisations in the process of change. In 1998, she joined the Advisory
Council for Science and Technology Policy (AWT) as a senior policy officer. In 2001 she was appointed as its Director, which she remained until her appointment as Secretary-General of the Social and Economic Council on 1 February 2007. In addition to her SER position, Véronique Timmerhuis is a member of the Supervisory Board of the Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the Advisory board of the Business Administration programme of Radboud University Nijmegen. Currently she is also a member of an Expert Group installed by the European Commission on the 3% R&D objective: progress made and post-2010 policy scenarios.