ESMU Staff

Secretary General

Nadine Burquel joined ESMU in 1990 after working for two years at IBM’s International Education Centre. She graduated in Germanic languages from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and in management from ICHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Brussels).

Secretary-General of ESMU since 1995, she is working at the strategic level with the ESMU executive board, general assembly and steering committees of networks, projects and training programmes.

Nadine Burquel is one of the founding members of the two networks set up by ESMU, i.e. HUMANE (European heads of administration) and DEAN (deans of faculties) and is involved in the daily management of the DEAN network. She was the director of the ETAPE consortium (Consortium for European Technical Assistance for Programmes in Education) which until January 2006 was assisting the European Commission with the management of the Socrates, Leonardo and Youth for Europe III programmes. She is also managing ESMU’s Benchmarking activities on university management and is the executive director of the ESMU-HUMANE Winter School for Senior Administrators.

She is the coordinator of several new EU-funded Lifelong learning projects, such as MODERN (European Platform Higher Education Modernisation), a major consortium of 10 core and 26 associate partners (European associations in Higher Education and academic providers of Higher Education management programmes). She also directs the EU-funded Benchmarking in European Higher Education project and a new Erasmus Mundus project with partners from Australia, USA and Latin America.

She has managed numerous TEMPUS projects on strategic management with universities in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, and has contributed to several reports on university-enterprise cooperation. She has worked as expert and teacher in several distance courses on university-enterprise cooperation with UNESCO-IIEP for universities in Asia and English-speaking African countries and has been involved in a major report looking at governance and curriculum reforms in 32 European countries.

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ESMU Staff

Head of Office

After spending ten years working in the airline industry both in the United Kingdom and Belgium, Tim Evans joined ESMU in 1996 as project and finance manager.  As such Tim has been involved several EU-funded projects (Socrates, Tempus), networks (HUMANE, DEAN), conferences/seminars and the development of training programmes like the ESMU-HUMANE Winter School for senior administrators.

As Secretariat manager of the HUMANE network, Tim has organized all HUMANE seminars since the creation of the network in 1997, working in close cooperation with the HUMANE Chairman, Network Manager and Executive Committee.   Tim has also been involved in management tasks related to ETAPE, the consortium made of ESMU and ACA which has provided technical assistance to the European Commission from 1995 to 2006 for the management of the Socrates, Leonardo and Youth programmes.

Tim is currently Head of the ESMU Office in charge of the overall administration, financial management of all ESMU operations and contracts and the IT infrastructure (IT network, databases, network management and maintenance).   

ESMU Staff

Management assistant

Anne started her career as Press attache for the President of the Brussels Regional Council, then as Communication officer for private companies and associations.

After working a few years at the European Commission (DG Information Society) as web editorial coordinator, Anne joined ESMU in 2006 as management assistant, providing support both on administrative tasks related to general office operations and for the organization of ESMU events such as TEMPUS seminars, DEAN conferences,the ESMU-HUMANE winter school for senior administrators. Anne has also been involved in some project support such as for the university-enterprise cooperation and Higher Education project.

As specialist in communication, Anne is involved in the production of the DEAN newsletters, general editorial work and further development of the website.

ESMU Staff

Project Officer

Anja attended the joint Intercultural European Studies Bachelor and Master Program of Regensburg University (Germany), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and Université Blaise-Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand (France). After graduating in 2006, she carried out a traineeship in the department of Education at Bertelsmann Stiftung working on Education System Reforms.

In 2007, Anja joined ESMU as project officer. She is working on various running projects and activities such as the ESMU-HUMANE Winter School for Senior University Administrators, the MODERN platform, and the EU-STEP European Study Tours. Anja has also been involved in project proposals to the European Commission and in researching issues linked to higher education developments.

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ESMU Staff

Project Officer

Inês joined ESMU early 2010 as a Project Officer and is currently coordinating the activities of the EU-DRIVERS project.

Inês graduated from the Erasmus Mundus Master in Higher Education at the Universities of Oslo (Norway), Tampere (Finland) and Aveiro (Portugal), with a period of exchange in the University of New South Wales (Australia). Previously she completed a first degree in Languages and Business Skills at the University of Aveiro (2006) and worked for one year and a half in the area of Marketing. Before joining ESMU, Inês carried out a traineeship in the Unit for Higher Education Policy and Erasmus Programme, DG Education and Culture, in the European Commission.

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Senior Experts

Senior Expert

Lieve Bracke has acted the past decade as Secretary to the Board and the Management Committee of  Ghent University. After obtaining a master degree in Germanic Philology, she started in 1971 her professional career  in Ghent University (Belgium) in the  Faculty of Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences. She worked as Assistant-lecturer and Research Assistant at the Department for Historical and Comparative Pedagogics  and at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Higher Education.

Later on she became an advisor to the  Board of Higher Education and Scientific Research in the Ministry of National Education, and served as a cabinet staff member of the Minister of National Education in Brussels.

As Director of the International Relations Office (1987 - 2001 ) she was responsible for the implementation of the institutional internationalisation policy and international educational co-operation of Ghent University.

Senior Experts

Senior Expert

Dr. Christiane Gaehtgens was born in 1957 in Wilhelmshaven / Germany.
She read German and Slavonic studies in Gießen and Bonn and obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Bonn in 1987.

From 1989 she spent two years of postdoctoral study at University of Washington/Seattle/USA. Upon her return to Germany in 1991 she was appointed as Head of North America - Programmes at DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). In 1994 she took a position as Director of the DAAD office in London/UK.

Senior Experts

Senior Expert

Dr. Jennifer Somerville is an experienced academic leader with a proven track record of strategic policy development and delivery of most aspects of university management at executive level.  She also has considerable experience of project management and evaluation in the UK and internationally.