Damien Gerard serves as a case handler in the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission and is an academic affiliated with the University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium) and the College of Europe (Bruges and Natolin), where he also heads the Global Competition Law Center (GCLC).  Trained at the University of Louvain, the College of Europe and NYU Law School, he previously clerked for Judge Lenaerts of the European Court of Justice and practised with Cleary Gottlieb LLP for more than 10 years.  Damien Gerard has published and spoken extensively on EU competition law enforcement, substantive antitrust law, EU State aids law and general EU law, including internal market and institutional matters.  

Isane Aparicio is currently working as a manager for EU funding at Schuman Associates, a Brussels based consultancy. She has more than 15 years’ experience in drafting, management and evaluation of projects for local bodies, NGOs and non-profit organisations. Before moving to Brussels, she worked 7 years with the Red Cross and other international organisations in the areas of migration, social rights and cooperation and development. She has field experience in Venezuela, Cape Vert and Mozambique and has delivered training for both public sector and business audience. Isane holds a Master in Cooperation and Development by the Basque Country University and a Business Management course by Solvay Business School.

Tanguy Struye de Swielande holds a Master in International Relations from the Catholic University of Louvain, where he also obtained his PhD in Political Sciences in 2003. He is specialised in geopolitics, geostrategic and geo-economics of great powers, and focusing on new security questions (asymmetry, privatisation of security). After having worked as an independent consultant from 2005 to 2006, in 2007 he joined The Egmont Institute as Research Fellow in the Security & Global Governance Department – a think tank associated to the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since 2006 he is a professor at the University of Mons and at the Royal Military Academy, where he teaches geopolitics. In 2008 he became the coordinator of the InBev Baillet-Latour Chair programme EU-China at the Catholic University of Louvain where he teaches one course on China and World politics and another one on Geopolitics of the European Union and the Great Powers.