Speakers
Spyros Arvanitis
Spyros Arvanitis (GR/CH) is head of the research section Innovation Economics of the Swiss Economic Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He holds doctoral degrees in economics and chemistry and has published extensively on the economics of innovation and the international competitiveness of firms and industries.
Erik Amble
Erik Amble (CH) is the founder and managing partner of Oslo and Geneva based NeoMed Management, an investment firm specialized on emerging companies in the healthcare industry. He is a founder of the Norwegian Venture Capital Association and has been a board member of a number of companies in Norway, Switzerland and the US.
Bente Angell-Hansen
Bente Angell-Hansen (N) is secretary general in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She took up that position in August 2011 after returning from a job as Norwegian ambassador to the UN and other international organizations in Geneva. From January 2000 till August 2005 she served as director general at the office of the prime minister in Oslo.
Nikolai Astrup
Nikolai Astrup (N) is a MP for the conservative party since 2009 for the Oslo constituency. A former leader of the young conservatives, he is now leader of the conservative party in Oslo. He was voted European of the Year by the Norwegian chapter of the Young European Federalists in 2011. As a student, he spent a year in Switzerland and later worked for the WHO in Geneva. He has a master degree in International Relations as well as in European Politics and Governance of the London School of Economics.
Thomas Bull-Larsen
Thomas Bull-Larsen (N) is an advisor and investor based in Zurich. He is chairman of Sensonor AS. After his studies in St. Gallen and Chicago, he spent 25 years with the consulting company McKinsey & Co. He is also a Board Member of Right to Play.
Aline Bütikofer
Aline Bütikofer (CH) is an assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen since 2011. She has a PhD from the University of Berne and was a visiting scholar at Boston College in 2010. Her primary research interests include family and labor economics, public health, and statistical methods.
Bjørn Hansen
Bjørn Hansen (N) is a retired correspondent who has worked for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation for more than 30 years, most of the time on international affairs. His career includes 4 years as US correspondent, 4 years as foreign affairs editor, and 5 years as anchor and editor of the foreign affairs program URIX, besides anchoring and editing other foreign affairs programs.
Kristian Berg Harpviken
Kristian Berg Harpviken (N) is the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His main research interests include the dynamics of civil war, peacebuilding, migration and transnational politics.
Daniel Klingele
Daniel Klingele is the second deputy head of mission and the spokesperson of the mission of Switzerland to the European Union since 2009. Between 2000 and 2004, he was deputy head of the Swiss Embassy in Oslo. He holds a law degree of the University of Fribourg, a diploma in European Studies of the Europa Institut in Saarbrücken and a master of International Law of the University of Stockholm.
Georges Martin
Georges Martin (CH) is deputy state secretary and former head of the division for security policy and crisis management of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. He joined the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in 1979 and has a master degree in political science of the University of Lausanne.
Ingrid Meissl Årebo
Ingrid Meissl Årebo (CH) is the Nordic correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung where she has been working since 1998. Before that, she held positions with different Swiss newspapers. She is a graduate economist from the University of Berne.
Atle Midttun
Atle Midttun (N) is professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Institute of Innovation and Economic Organisation, director of the Centre for Corporate Responsibility, and co-director of the Centre for Energy and Environment. He was also a visiting professor at the Université Paris Sud, the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Research.
Daniel Möckli
Daniel Möckli (CH) heads the Strategic Trends Analysis team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His research covers global geopolitics, European security, and Swiss foreign affairs. He is the editor of the annual publication “Strategic Trends” and the policy brief series “CSS Analysis in Security Policy”.
John Stoll
John Stoll (USA) is the newly appointed bureau chief for the Nordics and Baltics of the Wall Street Journal in Stockholm. He heads a team of about a dozen journalists in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen and Helsinki. He moved to Stockholm from Detroit where he was covering the US auto industry.
Lars Trägårdh
Lars Trägårdh (S) is professor of History and Civil Society studies at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm. Until recently he lived and worked in the USA where he received his PhD at UC Berkeley and later held a position at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research concerns the Swedish social contract and the Nordic model. In 2011 he was appointed to prime minister Reinfeldt's commission on the future of Sweden.
Kjetil Wiedswang
Kjetil Wiedswang (N) is a political commentator and editorial writer in Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian business daily. He has worked as the paper’s correspondent in London and Brussels and has written a number of books about social and current affairs, including the latest “EU, the crisis and the rest of us” on Norway and Europe released in September.
Nina Witoszek
Nina Witoszek (PL/N) is research director at the Centre for Development and the Environment at Oslo University. As a cultural historian she specializes in Scandinavian history and comparative cultural studies. Her academic publications include among others “The Origins of the Regime of Goodness: Remapping Norwegian Cultural History” (2011). Nina Witoszek is also a fiction writer and has been voted by the Norwegian daily Dagbladet to be one of the ten top intellectuals in Norway.