Johann-Dietrich ‘Jan’ Woerner became the ESA Director General on 1 July 2015.

Previously, from March 2007 to June 2015, he served as Chairman of the Executive Board of the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Jan Woerner was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1954. He studied civil engineering at the Technical University (TU) Berlin and TU Darmstadt, from where he graduated in 1985. In 1982, as part of his studies, he spent one year in Japan, investigating earthquake safety for nuclear power plants. Until 1990, Mr Woerner worked for consulting civil engineers Koenig und Heunisch.

In 1990 he returned to TU Darmstadt, where he was appointed Professor of Civil Engineering and took over as Head of the  Test and Research Institute. Before being elected as President of TU Darmstadt in 1995, he held the position of Dean of the newly established Civil Engineering Faculty. Jan Woerner headed the university from 1995 to 2007 and succeeded in making it the first autonomous university of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Jan Woerner has been awarded numerous prizes and positions, such as the Prize of the Organisation of Friends of Technical University Darmstadt for ‘outstanding scientific performance’. He was also appointed to the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and to the Convention for Technical Sciences (acatech) and is a representative of the Technical Sciences Section of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany.

Jan Woerner has received honorary doctorates from New York State University at Buffalo (USA), technical universities of Bucharest (Romania) and Mongolia, the Saint Petersburg University for Economics and Finance (Russia) and École Centrale de Lyon (France). He has also been awarded the honour of Knight of the French Légion d’Honneur.

Jan Woerner was Vice President of the Helmholtz Association and also was a member of various national and international supervisory bodies, advisory councils and committees. He was a member of the administrative boards of École Centrale Paris, École Centrale de Lyon, TU Berlin, the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and the Arts and Music University in Frankfurt, and he has been a member of a number of supervisory boards including Carl Schenck AG, Röhm GmbH, TÜV Rheinland AG and Bilfinger SE.

Furthermore, he was appointed to the energy expert group of the German Federal Government.

Before joining ESA as Director General, Jan Woerner was also head of the German delegation to ESA from 2007 to 2015 and served as Chairman of the ESA Council from 2012 to 2014.

Dr. Angel Abbud-Madrid is the Director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, where he also leads the new Space Resources Graduate Program, aimed at educating scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the field of extraterrestrial resources.  He is currently the President of the Space Resources Roundtable organization.  He has more than 30 years of experience in space projects conducted on NASA’s drop towers, microgravity aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station and received the NASA Astronauts' Personal Achievement Award for his contributions to human spaceflight.  Dr. Abbud-Madrid holds a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from ITESM, México, and Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Kristian Ebbesen Fjelde is heading up the strategy development team in Equinor, an international energy company inspired by its vision of shaping the future of energy. He is passionate about the long-term direction of the industry and the role the company is taking to bring sustainable, affordable energy to a growing population. Kristian joined Equinor in 2007 and has throughout his career held a variety of challenging leadership and professional positions where strategy, complexity and leadership have been core ingredients. A key focus in his current role is to help bridge the gap between current challenges and future opportunities. Kristian is confident that new approaches to business strategy, development of people, climate action, collaboration and building strong networks across industries is vital to navigating the energy transition.

Carina Helle Berg is a researcher and deputy head of CIRiS – Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space. Since 2009 she has been manager of the only Norwegian control room for remote operations of payloads onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Through the work of N-USOC, Berg and her team has provided support to scientists worldwide performing micro-gravity experiments on the ISS. They have collaborated closely with the operations centers of NASA and ESA and been part of the testing and verification of hardware developed specifically for use onboard the ISS.

In addition to managing the N-USOC, planning the test campaigns and integration activities, as well as the 24/7 support during real-time operations, Berg is studying human and organizational aspects of control room operations.

Dr. Bokach is an experienced project manager that has a PhD (2007) within transport processes in PEM fuel cells. His key qualifications are within PEM and HTPEM fuel cell technology and testing, fuel cell systems, PEM electrolysis, carbon catalysed pyrolysis processes, environmental engineering, project management. He has 13 years of industrial and academic experience in research and development of PEM and HTPEM fuel cells and systems, regenerative fuel cell systems and expertise in transport phenomena and electrochemistry. Design, building and operation of closed loop regenerative fuel cell systems for energy storage is one of Dmitry’s key qualifications.

Professor Anna-Lena Kjøniksen has a PhD in polymer science from the University of Oslo. She has long experience working on various polymer systems, nanoparticles, and hydrogels for a range of different applications, such as controlled drug delivery, gene delivery, nanomedicine, enhanced oil recovery, water purification, and energy technology. She is currently leading a large research project where microcapsules containing phase change materials are incorporated into concrete, with the aim of gaining a material with superior thermal energy storage capabilities while keeping its structural strength. She is also leading a research project in collaboration with ESA to develop geopolymers based on lunar regolith as building materials intended for construction on the moon. She has more than 140 publications in international reviewed journals.

Ole Dokka is a multidisciplinary leader and strategist, working in the intersection of innovation, design, technology and digital business, since the beginning of the internet economy in 1995. He has held leadership positions in several big companies in Norway, among them Telenor and the global energy company, Statoil.

In Statoil he was responsible for developing and implementing digital and media strategies, new visual and interactive brand identity and a new global marketing programme. This work received multiple Norwegian and international awards. From 2012 he joined the corporate innovation team and headed up Statoil´s open innovation efforts, globally.

He left Statoil in 2014 to take up a new position as Strategy Director in We Are Int., a digital business design & development company based in Oslo and Stavanger. In March 2016 he left We Are Int, in order to develop a new meeting arena and cross-industrial conference, Spaceport Norway. The yearly conference was arranged for the first time in 2017 and is now the biggest space business meeting arena and event in the Nordics. The next conference will be arranged in Trondheim, Norway, 4 and 5 September 2019.

In addition to the position as Executive Director for Spaceport Norway, he also took up a position as Chief Strategy Officer in the strategic event company Conventor in 2018.

Ole Dokka is based in Stavanger, Norway, where he lives with his family of 5 + 2 cats and a lot of surfboards, skateboards, snowboards, golf clubs and tennis rackets.