Category: Organisation

Chairman of the Board of  Trustees

Valentino Cavalli is an experience leader in IT, computer networking technologies and policies, project management and acquisition. His management skills include strategy and policy development, business and administration. He has an extensive network of relations with partners internationally.

Valentino graduated in philosophy from the University of Urbino in Italy in 1987. With interests in logic programming and Artificial Intelligence, he followed post-graduation studies after which, in 1989, he started working as software analyst and project manager for Omega Generation, an IT start-up.

Valentino moved to the Netherlands in 1999, where he worked for the Trans European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA, later GÉANT). He was hired by Karel Vietsch initially as Project Development Officer. After a few years working on Research and Development projects he became Chief Technical Officer and later succeeded Karel as general manager of the Association, a function he retained until he left the organisation in 2016. Valentino has served as Open Science officer at LIBER the European Association of Research Libraries and as Strategy and Innovation Officer at EGI.eu.

Member of the  Board of  Trustees

Victor Reijs retired in 2021 and has a long track record working for KPN Telecom Research, SURFnet, HEAnet and SIDN. He was involved in many networking technologies and services from earlier alternatives for IPv6 to  development and operation of X.25, IP, ATM, optical links and point-to-point services. He was instrumental to national and international developments on Network as a Service (NaaS/SDN) and clouds in the Netherlands and Ireland, and in GÉANT. He contributed to study and development of alternative protocols, such as SCION, RINA and NDN as part of the 2STiC (Security, Stability and Transparency in inter-network Communication) program of SIDN.

Victor studied electrical engineering (BEng, 1977) at Avans University, microwave technology at University Twente (MSc, 1983) and cultural astronomy at University of Wales TSD (MA CAA, 2015). In 2022 he successfully passed the traditional wind miller exam.

Member of the Board of   Trustees

Pekka Kähkipuro is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Tampere University, Finland.

Prior to joining Tampere, Pekka was CIO at Brunel University UK 2016-2021, Director of IT at Aalto University in Finland 2010-2015 and, before that, he held various senior roles in the private sector including Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks in 2005-2010. Pekka obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Helsinki in 2000. He has been Board member of the European University Information Systems (EUNIS) organization on two occasions and the President of EUNIS in 2015. He has also been board member and Chairman of the Board in several private sector companies.

Member of  the Board of  Trustees

Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository initiatives with a membership of over 150 institutions worldwide from over 40 countries on all 5 continents. COAR’s aim is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access repositories based on international collaboration and interoperability.

Kathleen Shearer has been working in the area of open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 20 years. She has been the Executive Director of COAR since 2013, and participates in numerous other organizations in Canada and internationally. She is an active member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and other initiatives related to open science. Most recently in April 2020, Shearer published a paper with colleagues on the need for bibliodiversity in open scholarly communications called Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action. Shearer is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and was instrumental in launching the Portage Initiative in Canada, a national research data management network.

Treasurer of the Board of  Trustees

Antoinette Vietsch is owner and director of AVI research and consultancy since 2010.

Antoinette graduated in 1983 from Delft University of Technology as an architect. She got her PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology in 1987. She worked for Eindhoven University of Technology, Medical Architecture Research Unit in London, National Board for Health Institutes (Bouwcollege) and Twynstra Gudde consultancy in the Netherlands. She also was a member of the Council for mail and telecommunication (Raad van Advies voor Post en Telecommunicatie) in the Netherlands (1991-1996). From 2002 to 2010 she was a Member of the Dutch Parliament.

Secretary of the Board of Trustees

John Dyer has worked in the field of networking for the Research and Education community since 1986. During this time he worked for the Joint Network Team, UKERNA and JANET the UK research and education network.

In 1999 he moved to the Trans-European Research & Education Networking Association (TERENA) where he held the posts of Chief Technical Officer and Business & Technology Strategist based in Amsterdam. John remained with the organisation after it was subsumed into the GÉANT Association until he left the organisation at the end of March 2016.

John studied Physical Sciences at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) where he was awarded a BSc with First Class Honours. His Final Year Project was in the area of Nuclear Science with a particular emphasis on automation of data capture and handling techniques.

He successfully completed a Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA) during 2001