Piet Van Hove

HEROES Alliance, Belgium

Piet Van Hove is the Secretary-General of the HEROES European University Alliance, on behalf of the coordinating institution, Thomas More University of Applied Sciences in Belgium. He is the immediate past president (2022-2024) of the EAIE. 
Piet has worked on different aspects of internationalisation of higher education (mobility, capacity building, strategic networking, ...) throughout his whole career, after graduating from law school in 1995. He was the head of the International Relations Office of the University of Antwerp for 15 years. 
Piet has been active in the leadership of several professional associations and nonprofits at the national and international level, such as Flanders Knowledge Area, ACA and the EAIE. He is currently a board member of the NGO Apopo ('training rats to save lives') and of ILEP Ltd, which is the organisation implementing Taith, the learning mobility programme for Wales. He presents frequently on the different aspects of internationalisation of higher education. 
 

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Upenyu S. Majee

Michigan State University, USA

Upenyu S. Majee is the Inaugural Director of the Institute of Ubuntu Thought and Practice (IUTP) at Michigan State University (MSU). He previously served as 1) Faculty Lead for the Reeves Scholars Program, a 2020-2025 reciprocal exchange between teacher candidates at MSU and the University of Cape Coast, Ghana and 2) Project Manager for Ubuntu Dialogues, a 2019-2023 collaboration between MSU and Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Upenyu holds a joint PhD in Educational Policy Studies and Development Studies, and master’s degrees in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis & African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Zimbabwe. His research and teaching revolve around internationalization and US-Africa engagement in higher education, and Ubuntu as a philosophy, epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy. Upenyu is a member of the Comparative and International Education Society and the African Studies Association. He finds joy and growth opportunities in convening and curating substantive and sustained dialogues across differences.

Prof Lynette Jacobs

University of the Free State, South Africa

Lynette Jacobs (PhD) is serving as the interim Director of the Office for International Affairs at the University of the Free State in South Africa, where she also leads research on internationalisation of higher education. Her involvement in internationalisation of higher education spans many years both as an academic and as professional where she was involved in a notable number of international projects, the latest being as one of the project leaders of the iKudu project (EU funded CBHE) that focused on curriculum internationalisation and COIL within the broader discourse of curriculum transformation, and a Co-PI in the Female Voices in the Third Space: Researching Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in South-North COIL (British Academy/Leverhulme funded). She is the custodian of the SCOPUS indexed open access journal Perspectives in Education.  She is a Comparative and International Education scholar focusing on inclusive education opportunities, external barriers to such, and specifically on inclusive and transformative internationalised learning approaches. 

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