Laurens Jan Brinkhorst
Laurens Jan Brinkhorst formerly served as a member of the European and Netherlands Parliaments and is a professor of international and European law and governance at the University of Leiden. He has a long and distinguished political and academic career and is an expert in European affairs.
Most recently, he served as the Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs and minister of agriculture, nature management and fisheries. Earlier in his career, Ambassador Brinkhorst served as deputy minister of European affairs, member of the House of Representatives and leader of the Democrats 66 (D66) parliamentary party.
With the European Union, he served as the EU ambassador to Japan and subsequently as director-general for Environmental Affairs and Nuclear Safety.
In academia, he held chairs at Groningen, Leiden and Tilburg universities in The Netherlands, and Lausanne, Switzerland.
Ambassador Brinkhorst held various other posts throughout his career. He was a member of the advisory council of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C.; a member of the board of governors of The Netherlands Institute for Economics; extraordinary professor of international environmental law at Leiden University; a member of the board of directors of the International Institute of Sustainable Development; and visiting professor of international environmental law at the University of Lausanne.
Currently, Ambassador Brinkhorst is on the board of directors of the Salzburg Global Seminar, originally an American institution of higher learning located in Austria; member of the board of trustees of RAND Europe; chairman of the SieboldHouse; and vice chairman of the Turkey Institute in the Netherlands. He is senior adviser to the director general of the European Space Agency and is a coordinator of the European Commission for a trans-European railway network.