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Members of the Council

Prof. Mirosław Ząbek

Chairman of the University Council

Prof. Mirosław Ząbek is a specialist in neurosurgery and neurotraumatology. He is the head of the Department of Neurosurgery and Injuries of the Nervous System of the Postgraduate Medical Education Centre at the Mazowiecki Hospital in Bródno. He has been a long-term national consultant in the field of neurosurgery.

Prof. Ząbek has performed nearly three thousand operations on brain aneurysms. As one of the few specialists in the world, he has performed a series of brain operations in extracorporeal circulation and deep hypothermia. He is also famous for his pioneering operations in Poland, such as the implantation of a brain stimulator in the treatment of dystonia, the implantation of electrodes into the deep brain structures in Tourette's syndrome, and a series of deep brain stimulation operations in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Prof. Ząbek has authored and co-authored over 170 publications in the field of medicine, including books, review papers, and chapters in textbooks. He is the editor of the textbook "Zarys neurochirurgii dla lekarzy i studentów medycyny" (An outline of neurosurgery for doctors and medical students). He is also a member of scientific societies and has served two terms as President of the Warsaw Branch of the Polish Society of Neurosurgeons.

Prof. Janusz M. Bujnicki

Janusz M. Bujnicki (born 1975 in Kraków) is Professor of Biology, a head of a research group in the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw, and a visiting professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Graduated and received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw. Bujnicki’s research combines bioinformatics and structural biology. He is an author of >300 publications, cited >9,000 times.
Received two ERC grants. A member of EMBO and Academia Europaea, and a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Graduated from the Leadership Academy for Poland. Was a chairman (two terms) of the Science Policy Committee (KPN), an advisory body of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. A member of the Committee for the Evaluation of Science (KEN), and a scientific advisor in the Polish Technology Development Centre (PORT). An executive editor of Nucleic Acids Research. A member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, also represents Poland in the European Science Advisors Forum (ESAF).
Received many awards and prizes for scientific achievements, including awards of the Polish National Science Center, Ministry of Science, and the Prime Minister, and was decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the President of Poland. For his activities in science and policy, he has been awarded the André Mischke Prize by the Young Academy of Europe.
Prof. Bujnicki chaired the first University Council of the University of Warsaw.

Prof. Pearl Dykstra

Prof. Pearl Dykstra was appointed chair of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Previously, she had a chair in Kinship Demography at Utrecht University and was a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in the Hague. Between 2015 and 2019 she served as Director of Research of the Department of Public Administration and Sociology.
Her publications focus on intergenerational solidarity, aging societies, family change, aging and the life course, and late-life well-being. She received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant in 2012 for the research project “Families in context”, which focuses on the ways in which policy, economic, and cultural contexts structure interdependence in families.
She is the Scientific Director of ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations). In 2016 she joined the board of the Social Sciences and Humanities division of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She is an elected member and previous Vice-President of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, elected member of Academia Europaea, and elected member of the Governing Board of the International Science Council. In 2015 she was appointed as member of the group of European Commission Chief Scientific Advisors, and currently serves as its Deputy Chair.
Reassigned to the University Council of the University of Warsaw.

Prof. Poul Holm

Prof. Poul Holm is Professor of Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the Director of the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities and President of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Prof. Holm holds guest professorships at the University of Gothenburg, and at Renmin University, Beijing. He is a member of Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea.
In the past, he held numerous functions related to the management of scientific units and teams. Among others, he was Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Director of the Digital Arts and Humanities Consortium of Ireland, Chairman of the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, Chairman of the METRIS Committee for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities. Former rector of Roskilde University in Denmark.
Prof. Holm has played a leading role in the development of the history of the marine environment and as a historian has worked extensively with marine researchers and oceanographers. He was one of the three co-authors of the Humanities World Report (Palgrave 2015), and most recently he co-chaired the SAPEA evidence report on Food from the Ocean presented to the European Commission.
He is a Laureate of ERC Advanced Grant (2015-2020) and ERC Synergy Grant (2020-2026).
Reassigned to the University Council of the University of Warsaw.

Prof. Marek Karliner

Prof. Marek Karliner is a physicist, a specialist in particle physics, and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the years 2003-2005 he worked as Visiting Professor at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Since 2015 he has been the head of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also a member of the International Review Committee established in 2019 to review the research activities of the BESIII Collaboration at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Since January 1, 2021 he has chaired Israel’s High Energy Physics Committee and has represented Israel in the CERN Council.

Prof. Karliner has authored about 150 scientific publications, which have nearly 12,800 citations and a Hirsch index of 46. In his works, Prof. Karliner predicted the existence and features of a number of elementary particles, incl. the so-called pentaquarks and baryons containing two charm quarks. These predictions have been thoroughly confirmed experimentally through the LHCb experiment at CERN. In a paper published in 2017 in ‘Nature’, prof. Karliner described the quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion, a process that releases several times more energy than standard nuclear fusion. In another paper, also published in 2017 and selected by the editors of ‘Physical Review Letters’ as editor's choice, he predicted the existence and the mass of stable, double-heavy tetraquarks, containing two b quarks and two light antiquarks. It was the first widely accepted example of a stable exotic hadron.

Aleksander Hebda

Chairman of the Student Government of the University of Warsaw, a fifth-year law student. Engaged in civic and self-government activities since high school. From 2018 to 2022, he served as the chairman of the Association of Democratic Youth Agreement. In 2018, he was the chairman of the Youth Council of the Śródmieście District of the City of Warsaw. He actively participated in the academic community at the University of Warsaw, including serving as the president of the Rhetoric Scientific Circle. During the 2021/2022 term, he served as the vice-marshal of the Student Parliament of the University of Warsaw, chairman of the Legal and Rules Committee of the Student Parliament of the University of Warsaw, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Amending the Regulations of the Student Government of the University of Warsaw, and a member of the Senate Legal and Statutory Committee. From 2021 to 2022, he worked at the Law Office of Ryszard Kalisz. Currently, he is a Senator of the University of Warsaw and a member of the Faculty of Law and Administration UW Council.