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TU/e administrators feature prominently in Volkskrant Top 200

CEO of ASML Peter Wennink, who was appointed chair of TU/e’s Supervisory Board in September, climbed from 28th to 7th place this year in de Volkskrant Top 200, the newspaper’s annual list of most influential persons in the Netherlands. Executive Board president Robert-Jan Smits, who had never heard of this list before Saturday, is a newcomer and occupies 107th place. He is pleased with Wennink’s high ranking, and with the fact that the other three Supervisory Board members - Mariëtte Hamer (22), Coen Teulings (160) and Louise Gunning (167) - feature on the list as well.

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illustration Banana Oil / Shutterstock

Robert-Jan Smits said in a WhatsApp message yesterday afternoon that he was caught somewhat off guard by the digital congratulations he received from Eindhoven’s mayor John Jorritsma (ranked number 95 in the list) on Saturday. Smits: “I had never heard of this Top 200 list before, to be honest, and I was quite surprised when I received an app from the mayor saying: ‘Congratulations, you made it to 107th place as newcomer'.”

National newspaper De Volkskrant describes its Top 200 as an ‘annual list of the administrative elite in the Netherlands, based on a network analysis and conversations with prominent people'. Smits says that he’s especially pleased with the fact that Peter Wennink climbed significantly in the ranking list, from 28th place last year to 7th place this year. It should be noted that places 2 and 6 are occupied by RIVM director Jaap van Dissel (chair of the OMT) and mayor of Nijmegen Hubert Bruls (chair of the Security Regions Council) respectively. Those positions are inextricably linked to the corona pandemic. Kim Putters, director of theNetherlands Institute for Social Research, leads the list for the second time in a row.

National Growth Fund

De Volkskrant writes that Smits has been serving as Executive Board president at TU/e since 2019, and that he sits on the board of the NIOD Fonds, the support fund of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. But of even greater importance, naturally, is his membership of the ten-person advisory committee that will assist the cabinet in the allocation of the billions from the National Growth Fund. And it is on this very committee that numbers 107 and 7 on the Volkskrant list meet again, because Wennink, too, sits on this committee.

The recently reappointed chair of the Social and Economic Council of theNetherlands (SER), Mariëtte Hamer, a member of TU/e’s Supervisory Board since 2018, climbed a few places in de Volkskrant Top 200: from 27th to 22nd place. Her fellow Supervisory Board member Louise Gunning, appointed on September 1 of this year, occupies 167th place. Gunning stepped down as UvA board president in 2015, and currently serves as chair of the Supervisory Board of the Royal Schiphol Group. Economist Coen Teulings (going from 138th to 160th place), being a member of the Supervisory Board since Septembre 2013, is a university professor at Utrecht University.

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