EUCYS 2025 jury

Hans Langeveld is a tropical agronomist analysing land use and bioenergy technology. He focuses on sustainable land management and biobased production with emphasis on the generation of biogas, and the impact of organic fertilizers on soil health. Hans
obtained an MSc at Wageningen University, and worked for the Centre for World Food Studies (Free University, Amsterdam) and Plant Research International (part of Wageningen University and Research) before starting a research and consultancy firm in 2008.

Hans was a reviewer for Horizon 2020 and the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU). Between 2008 and 2018, he was member of various Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme (International Energy Agency) working groups.

Currently, Hans is leading a project on the valorisation of organic fertilizers in Africa. He also participates in a new project developing innovative technologies that convert low-grade organic waste into durable, sustainable materials, and is working as an advisor to the Dutch government on ammonia emission policies. Hans is a project reviewer in the field of bioenergy and the biobased economy. As a EUCYS jury member, Hans’ objective is to help students to find the object(s) of their passion and set out a route to develop their skills and interest in the subject.

Franco Algieri is Associate Professor of International Relations and Head of the International Relations Department at Webster Vienna Private University
and a member of the Science Commission of the Austrian Ministry of Defence. In previous positions, he was Director of Research at the Austrian Institute for
European and Security Policy (AIES), Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Applied Policy Research (C.A.P) Munich and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science
University of Tübingen and at the Geschwister Scholl Institute University of Munich. He was also an appointed Guest Professor at Renmin University of China Beijing.

Algieri studied Political Science and Sinology in Freiburg, Tübingen and Taipei, and European Studies in Bruges. He received his doctorate and M.A. both from the University of Tübingen, and a Diploma of Advanced European Studies from the College of Europe Bruges.

His research and publications cover European foreign and security policies, Asian security issues, and EU-Asia relations, with special emphasis on EUChina relations.

He pursued his PhD degree in Plant Physiology at the University of Gothenburg. He graduated in 2001 and spent the following year and a half as a postdoctoral student at Leicester University. The next year he spent at Gotland University and Skövde
University as a senior lecturer. He then returned to the University of Gothenburg in 2004, where he attained full Professorship in Plant Molecular Biology 2016.

He was the Head of the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, 2016-2022. As a graduate student, he studied protein targeting of a chlorophyll-related protein to the envelope and the thylakoid membrane. He then switched during his postdoctoral period to study the chloroplast protein import machinery with a focus on the components that make up the machinery.

Back in Sweden his research group also added studies of vesicle transport inside the chloroplasts. He has worked with different plant systems i.e. pea, barley, Arabidopsis and wheat. His current research took off as a pilot project in 2012 and involves molecular breeding of wheat to fight salt affected soils using salt tolerant wheat by studying e.g. transcription factors. Part of the project aim to produce salt tolerant non-GM wheat to increase the crop yield and thereby the daily food intake for the people of e.g. Bangladesh. He is one of the founders of OlsAro Crop Biotech, a plant biotech company providing AI enabled crop improvement for a future with food for all.

Tom Blight is a building physicist, working with architects and engineers to find sustainable solutions for the comfort and usability of the buildings and spaces we inhabit.

Since completing his Masters in Physics at the University of Exeter in 2009, he shifted
from studying magnets using ultrafast lasers, to ecohomes, studying environmental physics and simulation of the built environment for his PhD at the University of Bath. He spent four years working at BuroHappold Engineering as a Senior Consultant, before moving to the Netherlands and setting up his own consultancy, Simstream, in 2018. Through Simstream, Tom provides a variety of building physics and energy modelling
services, helping a range of clients achieve ambitious goals in their projects, including football stadia, hightech labs, and flagship office projects.

As an EUCYS jury member, Tom is excited to spend time meeting and supporting budding scientists and young engineers with a passion to explore, create, and change!

Dr. Victoria Bloodworth studied Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College London, UK, earning her PhD in 2008, specialising in carbon fibre composite structures. She then spent the next eight years working at Aerotrope, a small and radical engineering
consultancy based in Brighton, UK. During this time, she was part of the design team with a di- verse project portfolio, providing design engineering for wind turbines, large scale artworks and zero carbon vehicles, which includes the cur- rent world speed sailing record holder Vestas Sailrocket 2.

In 2017, she moved to Denmark to join the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer,
Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, in the Blade Design department where she was part of the team that designs and produces the largest turbine blades in the world.

At the end of 2021, she decided to take time outand try something different in life – living aboard her sailing boat and exploring the world. She is now back todesigning and making wind turbines again.

Dr. Attila Borics graduated as a chemist and a chemistry teacher from the University of Szeged in 2001, then received his PhD degree in 2005 from Creighton University (USA) for his contribution to the field of chiroptical spectroscopy and conformational analysis of peptides.

Currently he is working in the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Research Network in Szeged (Hungary) as a senior research associate and group leader. As honorary associate professor, he also teaches structural biology and molecular modeling at the University of Szeged.

His research focuses on biomolecular structure, more specifically protein and peptide structure and interactions, conformational analysis and structureactivity studies. This includes the investigation of the three dimensional structural determinants of the biological activity of various biological compounds and drug candidates, explanation of the mechanism of action of enzymes and receptors on a structural basis and the location of interaction sites of proteins.

Prof. Dr. Milena Horvat is Head of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Jožef Stefan Institute and Dean of the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School. A recognized leader in chemistry and environmental sciences, she specializes in mercury research spanning analytical chemistry, human health, polluted ecosystems, marine environments, and clean technologies, including sensor development.

She has authored over 350 SCIindexed publications and 24 book chapters, organized
numerous international conferences, and served as guest editor for 16 journal special issues.

Prof. Horvat has played key coordinating roles in many international research projects, actively shaping science-policy dialogue through initiatives such as the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Her contributions have earned her prestigious awards, including the National Ambassador for Science Award (2002), the Zois Award for Research Excellence (2014), and the International Life Achievement Award at ICMGP (2019).

Deeply committed to education, she has supervised over 20 PhD dissertations and many master’s theses, fostering the next generation of environmental scientists.Her vision combines scientific excellence, innovation, and sustainability, delivering solutions for global environmental and health challenges.

Emilia Kvasnicka is a physician at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, where her research focuses on oncology. Originally from Slovakia, she earned her medical degree from Charles University in Prague, Czechia, and has completed research internships at leading institutions, including the Mayo Clinic in the United States and the University of
Heidelberg in Germany. Her dedication to advancing cancer research is matched by a passion for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Emilia played a key role in the Bratislava Declaration of Young Researchers, an initiative that brought together early-career scientists to present proposals for improving research conditions across Europe to the European Commission and Member States. In recognition of her contributions, she received a Special Prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) in 2013 and was later named to the Forbes Slovakia “30 Under 30” list.

Susana Ladra earned her degree in Computer Science Engineering in 2007 and her PhD in Computer Science in 2011 from the University of A Coruña. She also obtained a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the Spanish National Distance Education University in 2014.

Currently, she is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña. She leads several national and international research projects. Her main research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, data compression, and data mining, particularly in information retrieval and bioinformatics, as well as green algorithms and energy efficiency. She has served on evaluation committees for national and international research programs and has completed research stays
at prestigious institutions such the University of Chile (in collaboration with Yahoo! Research Chile), the University of Helsinki, and the University of Waterloo.

Her achievements have earned her awards such as the Distinction at the RAGC-UIE Awards for young researchers, awarded by the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences (RAGC) in 2024, and the 2020 Ada Byron Award for Young Women Technologists by the University of Deusto (Spain).

Morten Lennholm has worked in the field of Nuclear Fusion Research for the last 34 years. From a microwave and control engineering education, he developed his knowledge of plasma physics and much of his work has involved a combination of engineering and plasma physics.

He has published in journals such as ‘Physical Review Letters’ and ‘Nuclear Fusion’ on the control of fusion plasma, plus in ‘Nature Communications’ to describe the potential for control of certain plasma instabilities through ‘phase space engineering’.

He received his PhD degree from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2014 for his work on ‘Real Time Control of the Sawtooth Instability in Fusion Plasmas with Large Fast Ion Populations’. Based at the Culham laboratories in Abingdon, England, Morten was operating the JET tokamak until it’s closure at the end of 2023 and he is now leading the design of the plasma control systems for the STEP fusion power plant.

Dr. Mariya Lyubenova is a researcher who thrives at the intersection of fields, disciplines, and sectors of society. She holds an MSc in Physics from Sofia University in Bulgaria and a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Munich, Germany. She currently works at the foremost intergovernmental organisation in astronomy, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), where she is head of Media Relations, Science and Public Affairs
Advisor to the Department of Communication, editor of ESO’s science & technology journal, and an active researcher in the area of galaxy evolution, black holes, and stellar clusters.

Dr. Lyubenova is a member of the Governing Council of the European Astronomical Society, as well as a contributing member of the Policy Hub of the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from
Satellite Constellation Interference. Aside from being invested in research and science communication, Dr. Lyubenova enjoys mentoring women and other minorities interested in pursuing a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).

Professor Milan Macek Jr. MD, DSc is the chairman of the largest academic medical/molecular genetics institution in the Czech Republic - Department of Biology and Medical Genetics of Charles University Prague 2nd School of Medicine and Motol University Hospital, and of the National Coordination Centre for Rare Diseases (www.nkcvo.cz; NKCVO) responsible for implementation of the ten year national strategy on rare diseases and resulting three national action plans. In addition, he is chairing the national Rare Disease Taskforce at the Ministry of Health. In this capacity his institute has been serving as a “clearing centre” for the dissemination of knowledge gathered within various international projects on rare disease-related research and diagnostics (e.g. EuroGentest.org, RDConnect. eu, Solve-RD. eu, Norway Grants) to partners in Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia and the Middle East.

In this capacity Prof. Macek is also the Czech National coordinator of Orpha.net. In his capacity as chairman of NKCVO he assured that since 2017 Czechia is ranking first within EU13 in terms of participation in European Reference Networks (ERN) for rare diseases.

Lidija Matija is a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Mechanical Engineering where she received her PhD in Control Engineering in 1997. She has been working in the Institute for Chemical Power Sources, Belgrade, Serbia, in the field of fullerenebased
materials, its production and application for battery production.

In 2002 she has changed her field of research and moved to the Institute of Technical
Sciences, Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, where she investigated fullerene and carbon based materials for biomedical applications. In 2005, Professor Lidija Matija moved back to the University of Belgrade Faculty of Mechanical Engineering where she joined the group for Biomedical Engineering within the department for control engineering and became the Chair of NanoLab.

In the period from 2008 - 2010 she was appointed as Seconded National expert (SNE) in European Commission, DG RTD, Brussels, where she worked as scientific officer. She is a founder and the Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University
of Belgrade Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Her main fields of research are: Clinical engineering, Early Detection of Skin Cancer and Melanoma, Intelligent Materials, Fullerenes and Carbon Nanotubes, and Nanotechnology. Professor Matija’s fields of teaching are: Control Systems, Biomedical Engineering, and Nanotechnology. She was several times awarded in her country for her research achievements in the field of nanotechnology and she was the coordinator of several national research projects of which more than half had industry involvement.

Maria Minarova is a mathematician. She is an associated professor at the Slovak University of Technology. Both teaching and doing research is her mission there. Besides direct teaching on courses in theoretical and applied mathematical subject, she supervises bachelor, diploma and PhD. theses focused mostly on problems of applied mathematics or interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research involving mathematical problems and where mathematical models can be set up as simulating physical, biological or societal processes.

Among focused fields of study bioengineering, biomechanics, rheology, thermal performance of buildings, fluid flow, immoderate moisture and moulds problems in building interiors, etc. can be named. Her work is one of her hobbies. The others
are sports, music, literature and nature.

Physicist by training, I have carried out my PhD on the structural studies of biomedically and biotechnologically relevant filamentous structures. Since then I have been working for more than 15 years in neutron and synchrotron structural biology, using and contributing to the development of state-of-theart instruments for high-resolution macromolecular and small-molecule crystallography.

As an industrial liaison scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) – the world’s brightest synchrotron light source – I work closely with the pharmaceutical
industry, providing access to our state-of-the-art beamlines to investigate the structure of biological macromolecules for drug discovery.

Luisa Pereira has a degree in Biology and a PhD in Human Population Genetics. She is a senior researcher and group leader at i3S (Institute of Research and Innovation in Health, University of Porto) who is interested in using genetics to infer the past and evolution of human populations and to evaluate the susceptibility of human populations to complex diseases.

She is a co-author of 145 peerreviewed papers in international journals and a book on popular science. She has been engaged in presenting her work to the general public, including young students in high schools, and regularly collaborates with local media.

Dr. Bojan Ribić is Head of Department at Zagreb City Holding – Čistoća, where he is involved in operational environmental services since 2009. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering, with a research focus on the application of artificial neural networks
in environmental engineering. His broader areas of expertise include renewable energy, energy efficiency, and urban environmental sustainability.

Dr. Ribić began his professional career in the gas and oil industry in the early 2000s, gaining experience in industrial energy systems and process engineering. Over the past 15 years, he has played an active role in numerous EUfunded research and innovation projects (including FP7, Horizon 2020, LIFE, Erasmus+), acting as either a project coordinator or partner on initiatives focused on environmental protection and resource efficiency.

In the last decade, he has been engaged as an expert evaluator and reviewer for the European Commission, contributing to the assessment of research proposals related to environmental technologies, raw materials, and circular economy under different EU programs such as Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.

Alongside his professional and advisory roles, Dr. Ribić is a dedicated researcher and scientific reviewer. He has authored or co-authored numerous peer-reviewed publications in journals and conference proceedings. Also, he regularly serves as a reviewer for several international scientific journals.

Lina Tomasella is an astrophysicist of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, INAF. She has a degree in physics and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Padova. Her research interests are devoted to the physical properties of explosive events, mainly supernovae. She is a member of the GRAWITA (Gravitational Wave INAF team) and ENGRAVE (Electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves at the Very Large Telescope, ESO) collaborations, which have the aim of carrying out multi-wavelength
observational campaigns after the gravitational wave alerts released by the ground-based interferometers network (LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA). Her scientific work is summarised in about 140 peer-reviewed papers published in international specialist journals.

Lina Tomasella lives in Asiago, a large plateau that hosts the observing facilities operated by INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padova atop Mount Ekar, where there are the largest optical instruments in Italy. In Asiago she is the institute coordinator and telescopes manager. Lina was awarded the first prize in the 1st EUCYS in Bruxelles, 1989.

Mira Van Thielen has a degree in pharmaceutical and medical sciences. At the age of 16, she won several (inter)national prizes with her medical project. At the same time, she was one of the founders of the educative youth organisation at the public observatory
MIRA (Belgium).

Nowadays, she works as a staff member at the Department of Anaesthesiology at Leuven University Hospital (Belgium). Her research interests are devoted to a combination of physics and medical sciences. Moreover, she is a board member of ‘Jeugd, Cultuur & Wetenschap’, a scientific youth organisation in Belgium.

My work combines machine learning and cognitive neuroscience. In many ways, machine learning models are functionally similar to the human visual system in that they can do some visual processing tasks as well as, or even better than, we can.

I am interested in quantifying how mechanistically similar these models are to the human brain: do they perform these tasks in a similar way to human visual processing? How can we compare how well different machine learning models explain the human visual system? Some approaches I use include building Bayesian hierarchical models to
systematically compare many neuroimaging datasets and internal patterns of machine learning models, and looking at whether different machine learning models exhibit the same performance patterns when damaged as we see in progressively severely affected
semantic dementia patients.

I studied physics at the undergraduate level before moving to cognitive and computational neuroscience in York and Cambridge. I have enjoyed lecturing statistics and doing some data science work in industry alongside research.

Dr. Anna Zajakina is the head of the Cancer Gene Therapy Group at the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre. She earned her PhD in 2005 from the University of Latvia, specializing in Molecular Virology and Biochemistry. Dr. Zajakina further expanded her expertise at the University of Rostock (Germany), Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Bordeaux (France).

She is the author of over 40 scientific papers and conference presentations in the fields of cancer research, molecular biology, and virology. Her primary research interests centre on developing novel, clinically translatable cancer therapies using gene therapy vectors, often in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Currently, her main projects focus on the delivery of therapeutic genes via viral vectors, with the goal of smartly modulating the tumour microenvironment.

Dr. Zajakina collaborates closely with students and researchers from various organizations and universities across Europe, actively supporting interdisciplinary research through strong partnerships with biologists, physicists, and chemists.