CSTPR Seminar: Jan Marco Müller

Chief Scientific Adviser in the European Commission: Results of an Experiment

by Dr. Jan Marco Müller - Policy Officer for International Relations, European Commission's Joint Research Centre

Drawing on his experience as office manager of the European Commission's first Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Dame Anne Glover, Dr Jan Marco Mueller will present why and how the role of Chief Scientific Adviser to the President was implemented in the European Commission, how it was perceived both internally and externally and which factors led to the dismantling of the role after only 3 years of existence. The talk will present achievements and failures as well as lessons to be learnt for science advisory structures.

Biography: Jan Marco Müller, a German citizen born in 1971, served 2012-2014 as Assistant to Professor Anne Glover, the then Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission. In February 2015 he joined the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Brussels as a Policy Officer for International Relations. Jan Marco Müller joined CSTPR as a sabbatical visitor from August-December 2015.

Following his studies of Geography, Media Sciences and Spanish, he received a PhD in Geography from the University of Marburg (Germany) with a thesis about the impact of market liberalisation on the transport system of Colombia, funded with a grant from the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

From 2000-2004 he served as Assistant to the Scientific Director of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig (Germany). During this time he was instrumental in the foundation of the Partnership for European Environmental Research (PEER), the network of Europe's largest environmental research centres, to which he served as Secretary in the first three years.
 
In 2004 he joined the European Commission as Research Programme and Communications Manager of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Ispra (Italy), which is one of the seven Institutes constituting the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in-house science service.

In 2007 he left the Commission to work as Head of Business Development & Public Relations at the Headquarters of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in Wallingford (Oxfordshire), which as part of the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK's centre of excellence for integrated research in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and their interaction with the atmosphere.

In 2009 he returned to the Commission, serving until January 2012 as Assistant to the Director-General of the Joint Research Centre, based at the JRC Headquarters in Brussels. Following a brief stay in the Interinstitutional Relations Unit of DG Research and Innovation, he joined the former Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA) in March 2012 to support the recently appointed Chief Scientific Adviser in her tasks, before returning to the JRC in 2015.
 
Jan Marco Müller has fulfilled many scientific assignments, including having served four years on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Board of the French national environmental research centre IRSTEA (formerly known as CEMAGREF) and as an Assistant Professor for Urban Geography at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. Since May 2012 he is a Policy Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) of the University of Cambridge.