Josse R. Thomas graduated as a Pharmacist and holds a postgraduate and a PhD degree in Medical Sciences (experimental and clinical pharmacology) from the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is certified as a Clinical Pharmacologist and has more than 30 years of experience in clinical drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, he held or holds various academic and consulting positions, including former Visiting Professor at KU Leuven (clinical drug development), former member of the Medical Research Ethics Committee of UZ/KU Leuven, member of the Clinical Trials Board of the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE), National Expert participating in the European Commission DG SANTE Union Controls within the framework of the Clinical Trials Regulation (CTR), and Senior Consultant at PharmaCS. He is also co-author of the book ‘Global New Drug Development: An Introduction’, published by Wiley-Blackwell, and a reference in its field.Prof. Luciano Saso (Faculty of Pharmacy and Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy) is author of more than 350 scientific articles published in peer reviewed international journals (H-index Google Scholar 58, Scopus 48). He coordinated several research projects and has been referee for many national and international funding agencies and international scientific journals in the last 30 years. Prof. Saso has extensive experience in international relations and he has been Deputy -Rector at Sapienza University of Rome in the last 7 years. In the last 20 years, he participated in several projects and has been speaker and chair at many international conferences organised by the UNICA network of the universities from the Capitals of Europe (http://www.unica-network.eu/) and other university associations. Prof. Saso is currently President of UNICA (2015-2023) and Member of the Steering Committee of CIVIS (https://civis.eu/en) Prof. Em. Chris van Schravendijk is Emeritus professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. His research domain is focused on cellular biology, prediction and prevention of type-1 diabetes. As faculty professor he was responsible for the introductory course on Scientific Thought and Evidence Based Medicine in the first Medical Bachelor year and for the Bachelor course on Formulation and Development of a Scientific Hypothesis in the third Bachelor year of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Between 2008 and 2016, he was the Director of the Doctoral School of Life Sciences and Medicine, with more than 200 PhD students. He has a long standing interest in international benchmarking and harmonization in the area of Higher Education (MEDINE, MEDINE-2, ORPHEUS, UNICA) with focus on the place of the research component in the undergraduate medical curriculum as well as on career perspectives of academic graduates. As emeritus he is particularly interested in PhD workshops promoting better awareness of research integrity as well as the promotion of job opportunities in the pharma-biomed-medtech sector.
