Farewell Gerard van Oortmerssen

On May 15, 2003, Gerard van Oortmerssen bade farewell to CWI, after many good years as its General Director. CWI paid honour to him with the symposium `Managing in Knowledge Land', where Peter Nijkamp (NWO) spoke, as well as Ben Veltman (AWT), Martin Kersten (CWI and UvA) and Pieter Adriaans (UvA, and chairman of CWI's Governing Board).

Gerard van Oortmerssen and his work were very important for CWI's development. He started in 1991 as Managing Director, and became General Director of CWI in 1994. He guided CWI through a reorganization and founded the CWI Incubator BV to foster spin-off activities of CWI's research. Van Oortmerssen stimulated research and knowledge transfer, both on a national and an international level. In 1998, he became President of ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, and led it into a new role within the European Union.

Since May 1, 2003, Gerard is appointed as the new director of TNO Telecom (comprising the former research department of KPN), where he will develop TNO's ICT and telecom activities. We wish him all good luck, and hope to see him very often!

CWI's Interim Director is now Wim Hutter, former director of NWO.


For more information, see also TNO's press release.