Roy Pennings 

Roy Pennings is an in-house consultant at the ESS. He has a Master-degree in Political Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of South Carolina in Political Economics. Prior to that he also completed a study in print-journalism. His work experience includes: five years at the European Parliament as head-of-research for German MEPs specialising in EU grant funding. He also worked at a Training & Enterprise Council in the UK where he built EU-funded projects related to innovation and skills development. This was followed by the creation of a successful internet start-up. After moving back to his home country, the Netherlands, he first became a business developer and then strategic advisor to the company board of a large Dutch ICT company before focusing again on research funding.

- I became involved in BrightnESS as a consultant who was hired to co-develop and write the BrightnESS grant proposal. BrightnESS was a direct response to one of the scientific priorities within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap. A few months later, I was asked whether I would be interested in coordinating the project. The diversity of aims that BrightnESS intended to achieve made this an interesting challenge for me.

Together with Raquel Costa (on maternity leave) and Anne-Charlotte Joubert, I am responsible for the overall coordination and management of BrightnESS and the achievement of its contractual deliverables vis-à-vis the European Commission. I work very closely with the BrightnESS Steering Board, which is the day-to-day decision-making body of BrightnESS, and with the individual work package leaders and – of course – all the consortium partners. Simply said: my task is to ensure that our project is delivered on time and within budget, with every partner feeling happy and confident to do its agreed/assigned tasks inside the consortium.

What I find particularly interesting in this project, is that BrightnESS is not trying to develop a specific prototype of a future commercial product or service, but that it is an instrument within a much larger effort to build new European research capacity. This is something you do not see very often. ESS’ activities and challenges are BrightnESS’ challenges and we have to facilitate technical and organisational solutions that work for ESS here in Lund as well as for the many In Kind partners across Europe. Thus far I can only say that the collaboration of the 18 partners in BrightnESS is going very well and this is being recognised by the partnership and by the European Commission – who is the BrightnESS funder – as well.