The team

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The team

The European Schoolnet (EUN) team in Brussels is made up of people from all over Europe and beyond. More than 30 staff members and trainees are focused on five areas of activity:

Management of EUN portals and schools collaboration activities

Open architecture planning and technical development for schools networks

Promotion of innovation

Marketing and communication

Administration and management

Executive Director: Marc Durando

Marc is responsible for the overall strategy, operation and development of all activities of the EUN Office. Marc is a civil servant from the French Ministry of Education (at the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine), he previously served as Director of two European Commission’s...

Senior Manager Policies and Practice: Roger Blamire

Roger joined the EUN in 2000 and is part of the management team, responsible in particular for planning and reporting, Insight and the co-ordination of projects related to innovation, validation, ICT policy and pedagogy. Prior to joining the EUN, he worked in the UK for Becta (setting...

Senior Manager Digital Resources: Jim Ayre

Jim Ayre is currently working as Senior Manager for Digital Content at European Schoolnet. He has previously provided project development and co-ordination services for the CELEBRATE and eCOLOURS projects and is currently assisting EUN with the strategic and quality management of...

Senior manager interoperability: Frans Van Assche

Frans Van Assche is in charge of the Standards and Interoperability Strand and is the chief architect of the CELEBRATE brokerage system, the Knowledge Management System, and semantic interoperability tools. Frans leads the CEN/ISSS project team on ‘Harmonisation of vocabularies’....

Senior manager internet portals: Santi Scimeca

Santi is responsible for the Schools Networking strand of the European Schoolnet activities.
He is project manager of various projects and web portals, including eTwinning, Futurenergia and EUN Community. He also coordinates the EUN webteam.

Before joining the EUN at...

Special adviser for studies and development - Patricia Wastiau

Patricia Wastiau is a Special Adviser for Studies and Development at European Schoolnet. She is specialised in public policy analysis in education and knowledge-based policy-making. Previously, she worked for around 10 years at Eurydice, the information network on education in Europe,...

Technology Senior Adviser: Jean-Noël Colin

Jean-Noël Colin Senior Technology Adviser to the Executive Director. Before working for EUN, Jean-Noël participated in several projects as a consultant for CELEBRATE and CALIBRATE. At EUN, Jean-Noël role is to help define the technological choices for the internal...

Financial manager: John Rolin

Since 1998, John's major responsibilities have included the day-to-day running of the office and its corporate publications. He is involved with the accountancy and the external presentation of the EUN activities. John also manages the financial aspects of various projects.

Pedagogical manager: Anne Gilleran

Anne is the coordinator of the European School Leadership Network project She is the EUN's main contact person for the European School Heads Association (ESHA).

She is also a member of the Pedagogical Advisory Group for the eTwinning action. A school principal and educational...

eTwinning webmaster: Evita Tasiopoulou

Before joining EUN, Evita worked as a Webmaster at the Communication Unit of Directorate General for the Environment (European Commission). She has been responsible for the Internet and Intranet sites of the DG and helped different Units to present and promote their work online....

Web editor: Christina Crawley

Christina Crawley joined the EUN Office in May 2006. She is the Web Editor for the eTwinning portal. Her responsibility are to define the editorial content and policy of the portal, gathering news and information from a variety of sources in collaboration with the National Support...

Insafe project manager: Janice Richardson

Janice is responsible for building and coordinating the Insafe Internet safety network, aimed at strengthening and raising the visibility of initiatives in the 25 EU member states and beyond. She joined EUN in October 2004, after having worked successively in primary, secondary,...

Alexa Joyce - Development Manager

A specialist in education technology, Alexa is currently working as a development manager at European Schoolnet. She has consulted for UNESCO Bangkok Asia-Pacific Bureau for Education, UNESCO International Institute of Educational Planning and for the OECD Centre for Educational...

Senior Policy analyst: Anja Balanskat

Anja currently works as a senior policy consultant for European Schoolnet. She is responsible for the policy analysis and elearning surveys in various projects, such as P2P, emapps and P2V. She was consultant to the European Commission’s ICT cluster in 2006.

She is...

Senior Software Architect: David A. Massart

David Massart is Senior Software Architect at the European Schoolnet. He
works on architectures, interoperability and standards for distributed
e-learning applications. He is responsible for the design and
development of the current LRE brokerage system and associated tools,...

Web application engineer: Sylvia Hartinger

Having discovered an interest in living abroad in countries such as the US, Australia and Spain, Sylvia is now enjoying the international atmosphere of the EUN. She is responsible for the back-end implementation of Insight, EQO, the demonstration portal of the Celebrate project and...

Researcher: Riina Vuorikari

Riina Vuorikari has worked in European Schoolnet (EUN) since March 2000 as a researcher. She deals with a wide variety of issues ranging from e-learning interoperability to the collaborative use of ICTs in schools. She is the editor for the Insight portal. She has degrees in education...

Software developer: Quentin Trémérie

Quentin is a software developer and is working on the server-side part of EUN projects such as eTwinning, SchoolPlaza. His focus is on the design of tools for the projects, and to fit them into the whole EUN software architecture. He studied computer science at the Institut Paul...

Project coordinator and Web editor: Petru Dumitru

Petru worked as a school teacher in Romania for about 20 years. He was also involved in teacher training education, mainly in the field of ICT and its pedagogy. Before joining the European Schoolnet Office as a Coordinator for Central and Eastern Europe, in 2000, he coordinated several...

Web editor: Sofia Aslanidou

Sofia’s main responsibilities is to be Insafe web editor, she is also in charge of the Insafe newsletter. Sofia is of Greek and Swedish origin and previously worked for EUROPE DIRECT as a trainer and responsible of the Knowledge Base of the service. She also completed and internship...

Information Communication Officer: Paul Gerhard

Paul's main tasks are gathering news for the insight portal as well as the setting up and management of EUN corporate portal and newsletter. Originally from Switzerland, he joined the EUN team after working as a Webmaster and web editor for the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht,...

Pedagogical advisor: Sylvia Binger

Sylvia Binger joined the EUN Office’s school networking team in August 2004. Sylvia has taught English and Arts at secondary level and as head of languages was responsible for the language department at her grammar school. She also has experience in adult education.

Communication officer: Silvia Spinoso

Silvia Spinoso joined the EUN Office in September 2003 as a trainee. In September 2004, she was appointed as a member of the teacher's support team for the eTwinning project.

She is the main contact person for the eTwinning National Support Services (NSSs). She is the communication...

Web developer - Mourad Etbaz

Mourad focuses on database design and building applications and tools on the EUN's Web portal. He works mostly with ColdFusion, implementing ideas from the creative team. He also manages junior developers and trainees. Mourad trained in computer science at the ESI (Enseignement superieur...

Web developer - Bart Vanhulle

Bart builds attractive and easy to use Web solutions. His experience lies in developing database-powered websites based on ColdFusion, PHP, ASP or JSP. He has worked in a small Web company in Brussels, where he was a developer using ColdFusion and HTML.

Systems administrator - Ivo Šír

Ivo joined the team in April 2006 as the Xplora webmaster, later he became the systems administrator. In this role he is responsible for the technical infrastructure of all EUN online services. Before joining EUN, Ivo worked as a web developer, webmaster and systems administrator...

Accountant - Yves Kalisa

Yves Kalisa joined European Schoolnet in October 2007 after working for EUN as an accountant several months under an interim scheme. As part of the accounting department, he is responsible for the day-to-day accounting tasks, the monthly closing of VAT and the annual balance.

Previously,...

Web Editor - Chris Jenkins

Chris Jenkins is a web editor at EUN. A practicing teacher and lecturer in the UK for twenty-three years, Chris incorporated web resources in his teaching - including the authoring of several intranet and internet sites. He contributed to the development and teaching of a Bachelor...

Web Editor - Johanna Snellman

Johanna has worked as a web editor at European Schoolnet since January 2008. Her main responsibilities are science education portals Xperimania and Xplora. She provides content for the websites and participates in other communication tasks. Besides she is in charge of the Xplora...

Translation Coordinator - Nathalie Scheeck

Born and raised in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, Nathalie studied translation at ISTI in Brussels. In 2002, she completed an internship at EUN. Before joining EUN, she worked as an independent translator in Belgium for 5 years, among others on EUN projects like Xplora and Insafe....

Project administrator - Maite Debry

Maïté Debry joined EUN in September 2007 for an internship as project management assistant and became project administrator as part of the Business development – Information and Communication team in April 2008. Her main activities are to assists projects coordination...

Maths, Science and Technology coordinator - Agueda Gras-Velazquez

Agueda Gras-Velazquez joined the EUN office in May 2008. Working as Maths, Science and Technology coordinator she is in charge of the management of science projects including INSPIRE and Xperimania. Before joining EUN she has been working for the last five years in eLearning as tutor,...

Project Administrator/Coordinator - Stéphane Chaudron

Stéphane Chaudron works in the Project Support Team as Project Administrator/Coordinator. Stéphane has worked for several Educational Projects for the last ten years. After a short experience as a Geography teacher and a gap year around the globe, she has been the Assistant...

Education analyst - Caroline Kearney

Caroline Kearney joined EUN in June 2008 and is working as an analyst on studies and other knowledge-based activities. She is British with Italian and Irish origins. Caroline holds a Masters in Comparative Education from the Institute of Education in London. She has had work experience...