Isabel Capeloa Gil, President of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, is the first non-German woman to be appointed a member of the General Council of the University of Saarland by the State Government of Saarland, Germany.
Appointed for a mandate from 1 March 2025 to 28 February 2029, the General Council participates in the University's strategic decisions and oversees the management of the Executive Board of Saarland University.
The board is led by Margret Wintermantel, former President of the University, and includes external personalities from the worlds of business, labour and science, including Annette Kroeber-Riel, Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy for Europe at Google; Ferri Abolhassan, Member of the Board of Directors of Deutsche Telekom AG for T-Systems and CEO of T-Systems International GmbH; Thomas Otto, Director General of the Saarland Chamber of Labour, Dirk Heinz, lecturer at the Technical University of Braunschweig and Head of the Department of ‘Molecular Structural Biology’ at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, and Rainer Trinczek, lecturer at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Made up of 12 members with voting rights, the council includes several representatives from Saarland University itself: lecturers Alexander Baumeister and Martina Sester, Chairman of the Academic Staff Council Patrik Zeimetz, Chairman of the Administrative and Technical Staff Council Jörg Bautz and student representative Florian Andreas Spaniol.
The Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Saarland University are already partners in the Transform4Europe alliance.
