New head for European Research

The European Commission’s Director General for Research, Robert-Jan Smits

During that time, the Dutchman’s key accomplishments have included helping to set up the European Research Council, developing the research infrastructure element of Framework Programme 7 (FP7) and the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) road map, and getting the Joint Programming Initiatives off the ground.

“He has key experience in research and innovation in community policies, with a track record of successful challenges having been achieved,” said Herve Pero, the Commission’s head of unit for research infrastructures who has known Smits for about 20 years. He is someone with “vision,” he added.

Smits was instrumental in the early moves to get small and medium-sized enterprises into the Framework Programmes. He was also involved in running a heavily oversubscribed call aimed at attracting scientists from central and eastern Europe before these countries joined the EU.

“He really puts his heart and soul into what he does,” said Research Executive Agency Director Graham Stroud, who has known Smits since he joined the Commission and who attended Smits’s wedding in the Brussels town hall on the Grand’ Place.

Smits is replacing the current incumbent José Manuel Silva Rodríguez, who leaves the post six months before the end of his five year term. As the Commission’s leading science bureaucrat, 52-year old Smits is now responsible for drawing up research funding programmes for approval by the European Council and the European Parliament, and for overseeing the smooth running all aspects of these programmes.  

A lawyer by training, Smits takes on his new position just a few months after starting another new job, as Deputy Director General of DG JRC (Joint Research Council), the body responsible for carrying out research for EU policy makers.

The timing of this swift promotion is partly to ensure Research Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn has a stable team in place as she prepares to present the Innovation Strategy after the summer break, and starts to lay the ground for Framework Programme 8, which will kick off in 2014. Before then a mid-term review of the current Framework Programme 7 is due out in the autumn, providing indications of the direction of its successor.

“Smits is someone who tries to look for solutions,” said John Wood of Imperial College London, and chair of the European Research Area Board, who in his former position as chair of ESFRI had regular meetings with Smits. “He seeks the time to make things happen.”

Speaking to friends and colleagues paints a picture of Smits as someone who makes time to listen to those up and down the management chain. In his new position, he will report directly to Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn, with whom he is said to get on extremely well.

A combination of people and language skills (he studied at the Institut Universitaire d’Hautes Etudes Internationales in Switzerland and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in the US, as well as in his native Netherlands) will no doubt stand Smits in good stead in this new post. Add to this his long and invaluable experience of drafting, organising and overseeing research programmes, and Smits seems perfectly cast as the bureaucrat in charge of Europe’s research agenda.