Robert-Jan Smits

Robert-Jan Smits is President of the Eindhoven University of Technology ( since May 2019). Prior to this, he was the Director-General of Research and Innovation at the European Commission. In this capacity he was the architect of Horizon 2020, the 80 billion EU Research and Innovation program. Smits has also been instrumental in shaping the successor program Horizon Europe. In his last year in Brussels,  Robert-Jan Smits was the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission and developed concrete policy proposals aimed to ensure that in 2021 all publicly financed academic publications are widely available and accessible through Open Access.