Advisory Board

The BE-Rural Advisory Board has been called into life to share high-level experience, knowledge and advice with the consortium.

Tasks of the BE-Rural Advisory Board:

Quality assurance: provide feedback and recommendations on project outputs (e.g. important reports)
Act as a resource person: offer short-notice advice on specific issues, provide contacts, point the consortium to important literature
Dissemination: represent/mention BE-Rural at relevant occasions or events

Relevancy: ensure relevance of the project given the diverse background of Advisory Board members
Networking: raise BE-Rural partners’ attention to other relevant projects or activities in the field

Members of the BE-Rural Advisory Board:

Efthalia Arvaniti – SUBMARINER Network for Blue Growth EEIG

Efthalia Arvaniti works as programme manager for the SUBMARINER Network. The SUBMARINER Network promotes innovative approaches to the sustainable use of marine resources and offers a cooperation platform to related actors and initiatives in the Baltic Sea Region. Before joining this network, Efthalia worked as a bioeconomy consultant and editor of market reviews at NNFCC.

In the past 13 years she has closely collaborated with numerous cross-disciplinary and functional teams in five EU countries. She has a background in chemical engineering (PhD) and is a certified Innovator for Sustainability by Climate-KIC.

Ana Cuadrado Galvan – The Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI-JU)

Ana was a Project Manager at the BBI JU. She was responsible, among others, for the activities related to enhancing the participation of the agriculture sector in the bio-based industries. She reckons more than 15 years of experience in the management of EU research and innovation programmes and projects. Before joining BBI JU, she worked in DG AGRI at the European Commission where she developed and implemented the EU Strategy that supports digital transformation in agriculture and rural areas.

Ana has deep knowledge and understanding of the regional dimension, as she was Head of the Delegation of the Innovation Agency of Castilla y León region in Brussels. She takes part in different expert groups in the field of digitization in the agriculture sector and she provides Master lectures in that field. She is an Agricultural Engineer and holds a University Degree on Environmental Sciences. She completed her studies with a Master in European Affairs. She now works as Tech to Market Project Advisor at the European Innovation Council.

Laura Jalasjoki – The European Network for Rural Development (ENRD)

Laura Jalasjoki worked as a Policy Analyst in the Contact Point of the European Network for Rural Development, based in Brussels. She coordinated the ENRD Thematic Group on Mainstreaming the Bioeconomy, which explores Rural Development Programme’s possibilities to promote sustainable rural bioeconomy value chains.

Before joining the ENRD, Laura’s work focused on institutional development and capacity building of rural organisations, at the International Fund for Agricultural Development and at AgriCord. Laura holds a Masters’ Degree in International Relations.

Joachim Venus – Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB Potsdam)

Joachim Venus works as senior scientist at the ATB Potsdam. He is program coordinator for the research program “Material and energetic use of biomass” and head of the research group bio-based products at the Bioengineering department.

His scientific focus is on the development of continuous processes for the production of basic chemicals – in particular lactic acid – from biogenic resources. He is Dipl.-Ing. in biotechnology and has received a PhD from the University of Dresden on “Scale-up of aerobic fermentation processes in the pharmaceutical industry”.