Participants
Gijs Jan Brandsma (1983) studied Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands. During his study, he was a research assistant in various research projects, such as European party politics, Dutch party politics, Euroscepticism and access of interest groups to decision-makers. From 2005 to 2009, he worked at Utrecht University as a PhD fellow in an NWO-funded project on accountability and the European Union. In his doctoral research, he focused on the accountability of ‘comitology committees’ in the European Union.Currently he works in the research “Open Government in the European Union” as a post-doctoral investigator. He specifically focuses on the openness of the European Commission vis-á-vis other European institutions.
Deirdre Curtin holds a Bachelor of Civil Law (1989) and a Master of Legal Science (1983) from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Doctorate of Law (1991) from the National University of Ireland. She is currently Professor of European Law of the University of Amsterdam (since 2008 also holds part-time the Chair in European and International Governance at the Utrecht School of Governance of the University of Utrecht (since 2003). Previously she held the Chair of the Law of International Organisations (1992-2002) at the Law Faculty in Utrecht.She is director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG), a centre of excellence of the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam, established in 2009. She also directs the ‘Open Government in the EU’ project at the Utrecht School of Governance and funds a number of (post-) doctoral projects in that context from the Spinoza Prize she was awarded by the Dutch Science Foundation in 2007. She co-chairs (with Albert Meijer) the ‘Transatlantic Conference on Transparency Research’, to be held at Utrecht University on 7 – 9 June 2012.
The subject of open government has been an area of research interest since the late 1990s. Her current research projects include government secrecy and the relation with access to information, the relationship of transparency and participation particularly in relation to the supranational EU as well as more generally the accountability of executive power of the EU.
Maarten Hillebrandt (1984) has an MSc in Public Administation and Organisational Science from the Utrecht School of Governance, which he completed cum laude with a thesis on the changing transparency discourse of the EU’s Council of Ministers. Before coming to Utrecht, Maarten completed a bachelor in history and sociology (cum laude) at the University of Warwick, England. During his bachelor, he studied for one year at the faculty of sociology and political science of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Upon graduation, Maarten worked as a junior researcher at the Utrecht School of Governance, where he worked on an article exploring the historical origins of the transparency policy in the Council. His research interests include administrative policy analysis, the rhetoric and realities of good governance, and the interaction between citizens and government.Currently, Maarten is a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance. He posts regular transparency and FOI updates on twitter via @MZHillebrandt.
Bettina Leufgen (1981) has a Master of Arts with Honours (insigni cum laude) from the University of Edinburgh in EU Studies and European Languages, spending a semester each at the University of Verona and the Complutense University in Madrid. She also holds a Master of European Studies from the Jagiellonski University in Krakow and Georg-August University Goettingen and is currently engaged as a PhD researcher at the University of Utrecht at the School of Governance working in the research project “Open Government in the European Union”, funded by the NWO/Spinoza Prize. Bettina’s CV is currently not available online.
Albert Meijer (1967) has an MSc in Chemistry from Nijmegen University and a PhD in Public Administration from Erasmus University Rotterdam (2002). The subject of open government has been his interest since 1997. He is mainly interested in the relation between open government and new technologies. He has extensively published on issues of transparency, accountability, public control, participation and new technologies in journals such as Public Management Review, the International Review of the Administrative Sciences. Information Polity and Government Information Quarterly.