EXTERNAL ADVISORY BOARD
The External Advisory Board
The role of our external advisory board is to reflect with the coordinator and the project scientists on the direction and approach. Together they support us to reflect on the political, societal and business context of the project, techno-economic disciplines and computer modelling.
- The ambitions for European society and for Europe’s leadership on global transformation
- The business opportunity for industry to realize society’s ambitions through investments and divestments
- Process systems engineering
- Unlocking of industry feedstock from circular and renewable origin
- The generation and distribution of clean or renewable energy
- The analysis of transformation pathways by integrated computer models
AMIGDALA and its sister project TRANSIENCE have a seat in each other’s advisory boards to seek alignment and exploit synergies.
Pierre Joris is Engineer in Physics from education, holding a M.Sc. from the University of Stanford, and an Advanced Executive degree from Kellogg's School of Management, Chicago.
Pierre has 36 years of international operational experience in the Chemical Industry. He built his career for 30 years at Solvay, where he held different leadership positions in R&D, Corporate and Global Business Management. He completed his career as Chief Innovation Officer for the group and was then recruited as Senior Executive Advisor to the Chemical division of Daikin for more than 6 years.
Pierre holds now non-executive roles as Senior Partner at JF Chemical Associates, Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and is independent board member at various companies in the field of materials and chemicals, including Domo Chemicals. In this last tenure, he has been from March 2019 to 2025, chairman of A.SPIRE, a European cross-sectorial association partnering with the European Commission on the financing of Research& Innovation for the transition of the Energy Intensive Industries in Europe.
Research area: Energy systems optimization, conceptual process design, life cycle assessment, computer-aided molecular design, thermodynamics, microfluidics and CO2 capture & utilization.
André Bardow has been full professor for Energy and Process Systems Engineering at ETH Zurich since 2020. Previously, he was a professor and head of the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at RWTH Aachen University (2010-2020) and associate professor at TU Delft (2007-2010). He was also in part-time director of the Institute for Energy and Climate Research (IEK-10) at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany (2017-2022). He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2015/16). He earned his Ph.D. degree at RWTH Aachen University.
Prof. Bardow is a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society and chaired the Technical Committee for Thermodynamics of VDI – The Association of German Engineers from 2016 to 2024. He received the Recent Innovative Contribution Award of the CAPE-Working Party of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) in 2019, and the PSE Model-Based Innovation (MBI) Prize by Process Systems Enterprise in 2018. He was the first recipient of the Covestro Science Award. He received the Arnold-Eucken-Award of the VDI-Society for Chemical Engineering (GVC) and was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate in 2024 . He is the recipient of RWTH’s “FAMOS für Familie” award for family-friendly leadership, and of teaching awards at RWTH and TU Delft.
Louis Meuleman has a PhD in public administration and an MSc in environmental biology. His research focuses on sustainability (meta)governance and public management, and more specifically how bureaucracies can overcome barriers of, and combine hierarchical, network and market governance styles, when dealing with complex challenges of transitions towards sustainability.
He is Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute of the University of Leuven in Belgium, Vice-Chair of the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration CEPA (2018-2025), Acting Chair of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency, and Board member of the Club of Rome EU-Chapter.
As former public manager on environmental sustainability at subnational, national ad EU level, and director of a former science-policy council in the Netherlands, he is passionate about making science and policy work together, about better understanding the long-term challenges, the drivers of change and linkages between them. He is an experienced moderator and speaker on sustainability, interactive policymaking and communication.
Since his retirement from European commission per 2021, he has done advisory work with his think tank Public Strategy for Sustainable Development (PS4SD), for among others the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, OECD, Council of Europe, UNITAR, UNEP, WWF, national governments (e.g. Germany, Romania, Cyprus), and cities (through URBACT).
Contact: louismeuleman@ps4sd.eu and www.ps4sd.eu
Koasidis Konstantinos | EPU-NTUA
Sebastian Engell received a Dipl.-Ing degree in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany in 1978 and the Dr.-Ing. Degree and the venia legendi in Automatic Control from Universität Duisburg in 1981 and 1987. 1986 – 1990 he was the head of an R&D group at the Fraunhofer Institute IITB in Karlsruhe, Germany. 1990 he was appointed as a Full Professor of Process Dynamics and Operations in the Department of Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund where his group worked on a broad range of topics in process systems engineering. He was Vice-Rector for Research and International Relations of TU Dortmund 2002-2006. He had leading roles in about 15 EU projects on digital and process technologies and supporting international collaboration. Currently he is involved in 3 projects on recycling and industrial and industrial-urban symbiosis and in the CSA INPACE that supports the Digital Partnerships between the EU and the Indo-Pacific countries.
Dr. Engell is an IFAC Fellow since 2006, he received best paper awards of leading journals, an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant in 2011, and the Arnold Eucken Medal from the German Association for Process Engineering in 2021. He has graduated 96 PhD students at TU Dortmund.
Since 2023 he has served as the Chair of the Advisory and Programming Group of A.SPIRE, the association that represents the private sector in the PPP Processes4Planet with the European Commission.
Rahmat Poudineh is head of electricity research programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where he has headed the Institute’s electricity programme since its launch in 2015. An engineer-economist by training, his research includes, among others, electricity-market design, network regulation, and the emerging role of hydrogen in low-carbon power systems.
Rahmat earned his PhD in Energy Economics from Durham University and leverages earlier engineering and economics degrees to bridge technical and commercial perspectives. He has authored several peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and policy reports that have been widely cited, and he regularly advises regulators, utilities and international organisations on power-sector reform and energy-transition strategy. As an Advisory Board member of this project, he brings two decades of evidence-based insight into creating secure, affordable and sustainable energy futures.