Carlos von Bonhorst, Belgium

Full name

Carlos Bonhorst MD

About

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, where he got his MD in 1981. Carlos moved to Switzerland in 1985 to pick-up a senior position in a pharmaceutical group. He was responsible, among other corporate functions, for the company’s evaluation of Research and development (R&D) projects regarding pharmaceutical compounds. He therefore gained very extensive knowledge of the R&D management issues from an industrial point of view, as well as very large experience on Intellectual Property issues, which are of paramount importance in this field.

Carlos moved to Brussels in 1994 and from this central location he has developed a series of activities linked both with the industry as well as with different R&D funding institutions, including the European Commission, Belgian Federal government and the Regional Walloon Government, as well as some private research foundations. He has continued to be a consultant to a few pharmaceutical groups and national companies.

He has worked for the European Commission (EC) as Project Technical Advisor and Project Technical Assistant in FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7. In this last FP7 case he worked in the fields of NanoMaterials and NanoMedicine. Carlos has functioned as a mediator between the projects and the EC, helping both project consortia and the EC achieving their respective goals.

Carols has been an independent evaluator of R&D projects both in FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7, in numerous Health calls. He has also been called to review projects in the Health and Biomaterials areas. He sits as scientific expert in the Walloon committee that releases the accreditation for the R&D collective research centers and has also been involved in the evaluation of local (Belgian) industrial and applied R&D projects for the past 10 years.

He has been involved in the active dissemination of research to the non-scientific world, namely the 2007 Converging Technologies Forum, Health & Society, the European Vision Summit 2008 and 2008 EVER, as well as in actions directed towards increasing participation of SMEs in FP7 proposals.

Carlos was a partner in FUTURAGE, a FP7 project that aimed to produce the definitive road map to guide European research on ageing and health for the next 10-15 years. It represented plans for the most extensive consultation ever conducted in this field and for the mobilisation of not only the leading scientists but also the stakeholders that will determine the fate of the road map.

He brought his long standing experience in industrial and academic research projects, deriving from the technical knowledge and managerial positions he has held in his career with the pharmaceutical industry and the series of institutions he has worked with.

In particular he helped in the setting up of the dissemination of the results of the project, in order to maximize FUTURAGE impact in all sectors, ranging from science policy makers to general political actors (in particular MEPs) and the general public.