Our Advisory Board

Lin Goethals is the Director at the European Institute for Asian Studies, a think tank and policy research centre based in Brussels focusing on EU-Asia Relations. Lin Goethals holds a Master's degree in Political Sciences from Ghent University in Belgium.  Her main research interests include EU-China relations, EU-Asia affairs, ASEAN, public diplomacy, as well as people-to-people, education and youth cooperation between Asia and Europe. She has held different positions in specific research projects, such as the EU-Youth Policy Dialogue and the Immigrants in China project. She has had research and study experiences at a number of universities worldwide, including Beijing Normal University (Beijing), Peking University (Beijing), National Taiwan University (Taipei), the University of Padova (Padova), and the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town). She has also been a Research Assistant at the ESSCA School of Management in France, teaching on EU-China Political and Economic Relations.   

Prof. Dr. Ummu Salma Bava is Professor and Jean Monnet Chair of the Centre for European Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has studied in India and Europe and has over 30 years of teaching, research and administrative experience and is one of the leading Indian experts on the European Union, India and German foreign and security policy. She has numerous publications and these include “EU-India Relations - The Strategic Partnership in Light of the European Union’s Global Strategy” ( Springer 2021) and  “The European Union and the Changing Security Dynamics in Europe” (Springer 2019). She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg and was a member of the Research Advisory Council of Germany’s leading Think Tank - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), Berlin. Prof. Bava was conferred in January 2012 with the prestigious Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. She speaks fluent English, Hindi and German.

Linda Maduz is a Programme Manager for Asia at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

She received her doctorate in Political Science from the University of Zurich, having previously completed a licentiate degree in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Her research focuses on security and foreign policy-​making in East and Southeast Asia and the dynamics of political change within the regional states. She is the author of Contention and regime change in Asia (Palgrave, 2020).

William Hurst is the Chong-Hua Professor of Development at Cambridge University, where he is a fellow at Wolfson College. He works on labor politics, contentious politics, political economy, and the politics of law and legal institutions, principally in China and Indonesia. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the comparative politics of law and legal institutions in China and Indonesia since 1949. For this work, he has completed more than one year of fieldwork in each country since 2006.

He joined Cambridge University from Northwestern University, before which he was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford and an assistant professor at the Universities of Texas and Toronto.

Shada Islam is a respected and well-known Brussels-based commentator on the European Union who runs her own Brussels-based global media, strategy and advisory company, New Horizons Project. Before that, Shada worked for nine years as Director of Europe and Geopolitics at Friends of Europe, an influential independent think tank based in Brussels.

Shada is currently Senior Advisor at the European Policy Centre as well as Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Global Development. Shada is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Natolin) and a Solvay Fellow at the Vrije University Brussel (VUB).

In 2017, Shada was selected as one of the 20 most influential women in Brussels by the magazine Politico.

Michael Reiterer pursued his academic career always in parallel to his diplomatic one at the Austrian and then European service. He has taught at various universities in Europe and Asia. In September 2020 he retired from the European Diplomatic Service as Ambassador plenipotentiary and extraordinary of the European Union to the Republic of Korea (2017-2020); previous posts included Ambassador to Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein (2007-2011), Deputy Head of Mission/Minister at the EU Delegation to Japan (2002-2006), and Counsellor in charge of ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) at the European Commission (1998-2001). In addition, he co-chaired the Joint Group of Trade and Environment Experts at the OECD, served as panellist at the WTO dispute settlement and was a member of the European Economic and Social Committee.