Jean-Claude Burgelman is emeritus professor at the Free University of Brussels, director of the Frontiers Planet Prize and Ed in Chief of the Frontiers Policy labs. He left the European Commission Brussels in 2020 where he was in charge of the EC’s policies on open science, the European Open Science Cloud, open data and open access. He joined the European Commission in 1999 as a Visiting Scientist in the Joint Research Centre (IPTS) to lead the socio-economic research unit on digital technologies. In January 2008, he moved to the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (attached to the president of the European Commission) and one year later joined DG RTD, where he created top level advisory boards like the European Research and Innovation Area Board, the Innovation for Growth Group and the European Forum for Forward Looking Activities. All these groups contributed to the design of the EC’s huge Framework programs for research and innovation.
Till 2000 he was full professor of communication technology policy at the Free University of Brussels, as well as the founding director of its very succesfull research Centre for Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication. He has been visiting professor at the University of Antwerp, the European College of Brughes and the University of South Africa and sits on several academic journals.
He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Innovation and was a member of its Science Advisory Committee.
He is part of the African Open Science Platform and was elected in 2025 as Fellow of the African Academy of Science.
In 2020 he became the editor in chief of Frontiers Policy Lab, a platform designed to ‘’reinvent the world with science’’. And in 2022 he became the director of the Frontiers Planet Prize, a ‘’mission driven Nobel prize’’ to promote science that can save the planet.
He is convinced that open science can save the world (but not alone).
