Speakers
Tanja Reiffenrath
Baptiste Biancardini
Rachael Vickerman
Heather Knight
Isabelle Frochot
Eric Hertzler
Session
✅ Included for all participants
ℹ️ Panel (informative)
💡 Social responsibility
From carbon conscious travel and reduced waste to inclusive mobility, student belonging and shifting immigration landscapes, this Ignite© session tackles some of the big sustainability questions shaping international education today. Together, these conversations explore how institutions can connect the local and global, rethink mobility with care, and build systems that are more sustainable, supportive, and fit for the future. Join this fast-paced session where six presenters will have only five minutes and 20 slides each to share practical insights, fresh perspectives, and some thoughtful ideas to encourage new ways of thinking and working!
Tanja Reiffenrath is coordinator for Internationalisation of Curricula at the University of Göttingen, Germany. In this role, she supports academics in different disciplines who seek to (re)design courses and study programmes by integrating an international, intercultural and/or global dimension. She also serves as a policy advisor in matters of Internationalisation at Home, (co)designs professional development opportunities as well facilitates dialogue about internationalisation and digitisation in a community of practice. In the European University alliance ENLIGHT, she supports the implementation of challenge-based international learning, advises on the curricular integration of IaH measures, virtual exchange and blended intensive programmes, and works together with colleagues across the network to develop micro-credentials.
Tanja is the outgoing chair of the EAIE Expert Community Internationalisation at Home and will join the EAIE Conference Programme Committee in the coming term. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Studies in International Education and co-editor of the wbv book series "Innovative University: digital – international – transformative".
Rachael Vickerman is an International Mobility Coordinator at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, supporting inbound and outbound students who embark on an exchange program abroad. Through this work, she sees first hand the many benefits that an international experience can have for students, but also its environmental price tag, in particular the issue of mountains of household items left behind when a student's exchange comes to an end and they move out of their accommodation.
In response, she founded the Sharing is Caring initiative in 2022. Sharing is Caring breaks the cycle of waste created when students leave Tilburg by collecting good quality household items from departing students and offering them for free to new students who arrive on campus the following semester. To date, Sharing is Caring has kept thousands of items out of landfill, and at the same time has helped to provide over 4000 students with a warm welcome to Tilburg University through free, good quality items donated by their predecessors.
Rachael is also involved in consultations with universities across Europe to set up similar waste-reducing initiatives at their own institutions.
Eric Hertzler, is a global educator graduated in Economics and Management from Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris Saclay and in Law from University Aix-Marseille; Panthéon-Assas, and Leiden University (Netherlands). He is currently the deputy dean international relations and the co-program director of the International MBA at the IAE Paris-Est, School of Management at University Paris Est Créteil (UPEC) and also international relations advisor for the national public network of university school of management IAE France. He is deeply involved ERASMUS+ programs (external evaluator), AACSB accreditation process of his university school of management and a strong advocate of global competencies.
He has more than 20 years of experience of teaching Law, Economics and Management, on field working experience in Brazil, Belgium and California. He mentored students in internship and apprenticeship for more than 20 years in SMEs and top 500 companies around the world. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and visiting professor in programs in Economics and Management in many universities across the world (Colombia, Japan, Russia, Indonesia, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Serbia, Turkey...).
His fields of interest are Internation Education, Regional Integration, Global Management, Corporate & IP Law, Global Competencies and Cross Cultural issues. He recently published a chapter in Speaking the World Multilinguism and Cultural Fluency in the Professional World, Lazard M. Jaumont CALEC, New York, Paris 2024, p.52-66
