Pauline van der Meer Mohr

Today, a Berlin/Brandenburg delegation visits Erasmus MC together with officials from the ministry of Economic Affairs (EL&I) to learn about life sciences and health clusters in the Netherlands. Erasmus MC host Peter van der Spek (Dept of Bioinformatics) and Renee Bergkamp, DG Entrepreneurship and Innovation are jointly sharing Dutch life sciences/health innovation initiatives with their [...]

Akzo’s CEO Hans Wijers announced recently that Akzo will decouple its incentive system from their agreed sustainability targets. This is interesting, because of Akzo’s unambiguous ambition to be the best in its peer group concerning sustainability performance. The background of Akzo’s decision lies in the “black box” of subjective considerations that make up where a [...]

Imagine you are a student at Erasmus University, and you are invited to share your thoughts by the rector magnificus. Thoughts on some of the most pressing issues facing the university, such as student retention rates (also know as study success rates) and how to improve these. Imagine flanking the rector in the boardroom, knowing [...]

If you draw energy from interacting with bright young people, the Erasmus Talent day is the place to be. Today, all 32 researchers from Erasmus University who succeeded in winning prestigious grants and subsidies in 2010 were honoured by rector magnificus Henk Schmidt. Looking at the list, at least two things stand out: firstly, the [...]

My children have recently developed an Apple addiction, I’m afraid. They make me buy iTunes cards and manage to squander their pocket money on all kinds of nifty apps. And the worst thing is it’s even a little contagious. I admit to drooling over the next generation tablets myself these days. Apple seems to have [...]

In de Thalys voel je je nog een ouderwetse reiziger. Net terug uit Delhi (zie voor een verslag van embedded journalist Wieneke Gunneweg haar dagelijkse blog op EM online) waar het leven verschillende snelheden lijkt te kennen; nu ‘ en route’ naar Parijs voor een werkbezoek met de collega-voorzitters van alle universiteiten. In de trein [...]

Tomorrow, it’s exactly one thousand days to go to November 8th, 2013. One century ago, on 8 November, 1913, at 3.30 pm, the Dutch prime minister, Cort van der Linden, opened the Netherlands School of Commerce in De Doelen, Rotterdam. Its founding fathers were Rotterdam bankers and businessmen.The ‘birthday’ of this private school – our [...]

These were the words of Alexander Pechtold in his address to protesting students in The Hague last week. By showing his hand, the leader of D66, the Dutch Democratic party, indicated that he, too, found the so called “langstudeerderswet” (a draft law that penalizes students who need more time to graduate) unfortunate. Having seen the draft bill which [...]

Yesterday, the Erasmus Recruitment days kicked off with a large gathering of students, parents, recruiters and executives. I had the pleasure of doing the opening address (see attached). A suite of prominent speakers followed, including Pim van der Feltz (CEO Google Benelux) and professor Balkenende. Why all this prominence? Well, the war for talent is here to [...]