• EU & INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS

• QUALITY & TECHNICAL  ASSISTANCE


• SPECIALISED CONSULTANCY SUPPORT

E-mail: pva(a)ebn.eu
Tel.:+32 2 761 10 87

Philippe Vanrie is since 1999 the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of EBN, the leading pan-European Network bringing together 200+ accredited Business & Innovation Centres (BICs), Innovation-based Incubators, and Entrepreneurship Centres across Europe and beyond.
Philippe was instrumental in developing this unique community gathering thousands of smart innovators and entrepreneurs. A recognized expert and experienced speaker in innovation and incubation, Philippe has developed strong relationship and several collaborative projects with the European Commission (EC), the European Space Agency (ESA), and a series of national & regional Governmental Agencies.
Graduated from the Gembloux (Belgium) Agronomic Engineering University, and from the University of Louvain (Belgium) in Innovation Management, Philippe started his career as statistician at the University of Brussels (ULB) and then joined the first European EC-BIC (Business and Innovation Centre) in Liège.
  Afterwards, he joined the private sector where he had senior Marketing and Business Development responsibilities within several SMEs leaders of their market, notably in Agro and Food Industry.
During the last couple of years, Philippe initiated and conducted several partnerships between EBN small business incubation centres and several industry leaders such as BT, Procter & Gamble, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Auchan. He also conducted pilot-schemes in the field of academic and industrial spin-off, clustering, international business cooperation, local economic development and technology transfer.
Philippe has also served as an Advisory Board Member of the H-P Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), the European Centre for Innovation in Geo-spatial and Location-Based Service, the European Region Research and Innovation Network (ERRIN), the International Network for SMEs (INSME), the Europa InterCluster Network, and has been chairing in 2010 the Jury of the “Young European hopes of innovation”.

Linguistic skills : French, English, Dutch.

E-mail: bro(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 772 89 00

Blanca Rodriguez is Spanish. She has worked with EBN since January 1998 and is responsible for administration and finance.

Linguistic skills: French, Spanish, English, Dutch.

Vera Egreja Barracho
Network Development Manager

Vera Barracho (Portuguese) is a post-graduate in International Studies with extensive experience in EU funding & private sector support: access to finance, new markets, vocational training and marketing. Vera has proven track of working with the European Commission, having successfully managed and coordinated collaborative projects of multicultural teams in multiple project locations with budgets up to €2.5M. Vera's experience includes specific work with EU-27 MS, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and more recently ECA countries.  Currently Vera also coordinates the Soft Landing Club and the Make it Global project supporting female entrepreneurship.

E-mail: cha(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 761 10 88

Cedrc Hana el
Senior Consultant 

E-mail: nma(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 761 10 84

Nathalie Marchand
Communication Manager

Nathalie Marchand (Belgian) is graduate in Linguistics (French-English-Spanish) from the University of Brussels (ULB). She first joined EBN in 1992 where she worked as the Information Officer managing the EBN Newsletter and the updating of the website until June 2000. She then left EBN to work in the private sector and for the Euro Info Centre Network (now part of the EEN network) until December 2001 when she rejoined EBN. She is now responsible for the management of the EBN website, the EBN Newsletter and the production of EBN promotional material.

Linguistic skills: French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese (basic), Italian (basic)

E-mail: rsa(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 761 10 85

Robert Sanders
Head of Department

Linguistic Skills: English, French

E-mail: chiara.davalli(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 761 10 94

Chiara Davalli
Project Manager

Chiara joined the EBN team in April 2010. She has a Postgraduate Degree in International Relations, a Degree in International Studies from the University of Florence (Italy) and an Executive Master in European Studies from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).  In EBN, she assisted the Quality & Technical Assistance Department for two years before joining the EU projects team where she is now in charge of the following projects: IntraSME, MIRRIS, Ed2.0work, StartUp EU.

Magaret Mulligan
Project Manager

Prior to joining EBN in September 2012, Margaret (Irish) worked as the Research Forum Coordinator at the European Foundation Centre in Brussels, where she was responsible for facilitating the development of joint activities between research-funding foundations and their stakeholders. Previously, as an Information and Communication Officer at the Research Enquiries Service of the European Commission she gained extensive experience of EU funding programmes, in particular the Framework Programmes for research and innovation.  Margaret has a BA in Sociology and French from Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in Sociology (Research) from the London School of Economics.

Linguistic skills: English, French

E-mail: gdi(a)ebn.eu
Tel.: +32 2 761 10 83

Giordano Dichter
Head of Department

Giordano Dichter (Dual Italian-US nationality) joined EBN in February 2009 from BIC Lazio where he provided project management expertise in the management of regional and international programmes for local economic development. A graduate in economics from the University of Siena in 1999, Giordano was subsequently appointed as Professor of Local Economic Development at the International Master on Human Development at the University of Florence, Italy in 2007. Specifically within the area of quality management and evaluation, Giordano supported Italia Lavoro in the definition, elaboration and management of the monitoring and evaluation system of the Program ISI (Innovation and Employment Services), funded by the Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policies in 2006, as well as the construction of the evaluation systems of the interventions financed within the APQ Energy and APQ Social Inclusion (through Sviluppo Italia), in support of the Italian Region Sicily. Prior to this Giordano held posts related to local economic development with various organizations of the United Nations System in Italy and abroad (mainly, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, South Africa).

Linguistic skills: English, Italian

E-mail: smq(a)abuipm.ie

Siobhan McQuaid
Project Engineering and Management (in particular FP7) and Thematic networks

Siobhan McQuaid (Irish) began her career in WESTBIC (Galway - Ireland) where she was appointed the first manager of the Galway Technology Centre. She left WESTBIC to take up senior marketing management positions in various European and multinational companies notably in the field of telecommunications. She joined EBN in 2001 leading the project management and engineering team for four years and establishing a successful track record in project preparation, negotiation and direction in particular within DG Research projects where she coordinated large scale projects such as Detect-it 1 and 2 targeting SME involvement in FP6 and FP7. She left EBN in 2005 to establish a consultancy specialising in project engineering, training and management in the European Framework Programmes for Research (FP6 and FP7). She continues to act as an external advisor to EBN in particular in the establishment of thematic networks in ICT, Agro-Bio-Food and CleanTech

Linguistic skills: English, French.

E-mail: rbu(a)ebn.eu

Raffaele Buompane is an italian Senior Manager with more than 10 years experience in particular in the fields of Intellectual Property and Strategic Management.
He has a legal and economic academic background. He graduated himself in Rome twice with a Master in International Political Sciences and a Master in Geopolitics and he later attended an MBA course in the Imperial College in London. At present Raffaele is finalizing a PhD research in Economics focused on the aviation industry sector.
Being professionally born as External Relation Manager, he worked in the Italian Patent and Trademark Office, where he specialized himself in Intellectual Property, and the European Patent Office in Germany and in Serbia as External Relations Manager, Project Director and Team Leader for an IPR EC project.
Raffaele was also active in the aviation industry as Strategic Manager in London and cooperated with BMW Italy as Chief Event Manager.
He joined EBN in 2004 as Senior Project Manager and he is, at present, in charge of the EC project coordination.

Linguistic skills: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish