Franciska de Jong
Franciska de Jong was the Executive Director of CLARIN from 2015 until 2022. In her position, she led the expansion and sustainability of CLARIN, the outreach to new user communities, while also strengthening collaboration with new partners and continents, and the promotion of collaboration with commercial partners.
Franciska de Jong studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University, completed a PhD track in theoretical linguistics, and made the switch to language technology in 1985 when she started working on machine translation at Philips Research. She was professor of language technology at the Universiteit Twente (UT) 1992-2022), and director of the Erasmus Studio for e-research at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR), where she also held a chair in e-research for the social sciences and the humanities (2007-2022).
Currently, she is working as senior advisor for CLARIN ERIC. From 2022-2025 she will lead the work package of Horizon Europe project EOSC Focus on the sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud. Her main research interests are spoken document retrieval, text mining, access technology for digital libraries, interview archives and cultural heritage collections, as well as e-research in general. From 2008-2016, she was vice-president of the governing board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is a member of the NWO Permanent Committee for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure (since 2018) and the executive board of ERIC Forum (since 2020). A detailed profile can be found here.