Board of Directors
James Elles is a former British Conservative Member of the European Parliament for the South East region of the UK from 1984 to 2014. Since stepping down, he has remained active in a number of fields. Apart from continuing to chair the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN), which he founded in 1992, he is a Member of the Steering Committee of the European Internet Forum (EIF), which he co-founded in 2000. He is also the Honorary President of the European Strategy and Policy Analysis (ESPAS), which he started in 2010, examining long trends to focus on priority challenges facing the EU in the years ahead.
Since 1979, Thierry de l’Escaille has been running a family farming enterprise active in Belgium and the Netherlands, in particular in vegetables, sugar beet, potatoes, cereals, and flowers. In 1985, he founded Agriland. Since 1994, he has been Secretary General of the European Landowners’ Organization (ELO), and Chairman of various funds, and a member of different committees. He is currently a Member of the Board of several agro-industrial companies in Europe and America and is involved in Africa. He is a founder of the Forum for the Future of Agriculture and the Wildlife Estate Label and is deeply committed to private conservation, such as reasonable agriculture. He is a member of the Board of Directors of a major protected area in Latin America. He has also been an active participant in a number of working groups regarding CAP reform, Natura 2000, forestry, food safety, and soil use, among others.
Vivien Haig is a Board Member of the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN). Vivien is also honored to be a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council.
Vivien has been with TPN since its founding in 1992. She previously served as Director-General and was the organization’s primary liaison between political, business, and academic participants, as well as the European Commission and several U.S. administrations. She was responsible for running TPN’s secretariat and for all administrative, budgetary, and programming functions as well as coordination between TPN and all its external players. Vivien’s expertise is based on trust and mutual understanding, as well as humor and humility.
Awarded the European American Business Council Transatlantic Business Leader of the Year 2008, Vivien has also been recognized in the 114th Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives – an enormous privilege, especially for a European.
Edit Herczog is the Founder and Managing Director of the company Vision & Values, situated in Brussels. She is a Senior EU Liaison Adviser for GÉANT. She is Chair of the Administrative Board of the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) and is a Member of the Board at the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN). She is a visiting lecturer of International Management at HEC Liege.
She has been a member of the Research Data Alliance Global Foundation Council since April 2017, where she Chairs the Financial Subcommittee. She is co-chair of the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group.
Prior to establishing her company, she served two consecutive terms in the European Parliament as MEP (2004-2014). She was a member of the ITRE, IMCO, BUDG, and CONT committees, a number of delegations, and held roles in a number of parliamentary forums such as the European Energy Forum, the European Internet Foundation, the Kangaroo Group, Knowledge 4 Innovation and the Forum for the Future of Nuclear Energy. Prior to her election to the European Parliament, she was a member of the Hungarian Parliament, in which role she was a delegate to the Council of Europe. Before her political engagement, she worked for the private sector as regional sales and technical manager for specialty chemicals company National Starch & Chemical (belonging to Unilever and later to ICI).
She has an MSc in food conservation engineering. She was a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a professor’s assistant at the University of Horticulture. Edit holds a Certificate of Company Direction for strategic marketing, financial management, and company law from the Institute of Directors.
Peter Linton’s career as an advisor on European affairs spans some 50 years, all based in Brussels. During an initial 10 years with Business International, responsible for western Europe, Linton became one of the pioneers of the European Affairs industry, founding Robinson Linton Associates, which later merged with Burson-Marsteller. He is a co-founder of both the Transatlantic Policy Network and the European Internet Forum (EIF), and principal author of a number of seminal reports for both organisations.
Linton is a dual national, born and raised in the United States and now also a citizen of Belgium. He holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an MA from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Bruce Stokes is a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Previously he was the executive director of GMF’s Transatlantic Task Force: Together or Alone? Choices and Strategies for Transatlantic Relations for 2021 and Beyond. From 2012-2019 he was the director of Global Economic Attitudes at the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, and is a former international economics reporter for the National Journal, a Washington-based public policy magazine. He is also a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
From 2010-2012, Stokes was a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He was the author of the 2009 Transatlantic Trends survey and two task force reports: The Case for Renewing Transatlantic Capitalism and A New Era for Transatlantic Trade Leadership.
In 1987 and again in 1989, Stokes was a Japan Society Fellow, living in and reporting from Japan. In 1997, he was a member of President Clinton’s Commission on United States-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy, and he wrote its final report, “Building American Prosperity in the 21st Century.”
He is co-author of the book America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (Times Books, 2006) and co-author of numerous Pew Global Attitudes Surveys.
In 2006, Stokes was honored by the Coalition of Service Industries for his reporting on services issues. In 2004, he was chosen by International Economy magazine as one of the most influential China watchers in the U.S. press. In 1995, he was picked by Washingtonian Magazine as one of the “Best on Business” reporters in Washington. In 1989, Stokes won the coveted John Hancock award for excellence in business and economics reporting for his series on the impact of the rising yen on the Japanese economy.
Stokes is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.