WG Recommendations to the ESB

Head of EU Funding Management - Skills

Carlos Pardo is President of AESEMI, the Spanish Semiconductor Industry Association, and CEO of KD (formerly KDPOF), a Spanish fabless company. He has led R&D teams throughout his career in the microelectronics industry. He was Technical Director at SIDSA and worked at DS2 and as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He won the ICAI Entrepreneur Award in 2023. He holds a degree in Industrial Engineering, specialising in industrial electronics, from Universidad Pontificia Comillas (ICAI) in Madrid.

Giovanni Corder is Deputy Director General and Senior Director of Global Policy at ESIA, the European Semiconductor Industry Association. He leads the association’s work on trade and international policy and represents the interests of Europe’s semiconductor industry to EU institutions and member states

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Dimiter Prodanov is Director of the Laboratory of Neurotechnology at the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2023 he has led VIBraTE, a €2 million Horizon Europe ERA Chair project on how implanted electrodes interact with brain tissue. He previously spent many years at imec in Belgium. There he developed multichannel brain electrodes, coordinated the H2020 project NanoStreeM on nanomaterial safety in semiconductor manufacturing, and headed the imec Biobank. He holds an MD from the Medical University of Sofia and a PhD from the University of Twente. He has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and contributes to the open-source image-analysis software ImageJ.

Sophie Cordeiro has been Project Manager for Semiconductor Business Development at Robert Bosch GmbH in Reutlingen since 2023, where she focuses on publicly funded projects. Before joining Bosch, she spent nearly seven years as a consultant for electronics and microsystems at VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik. During that time she also managed the Chemistry4Climate project at the Association of German Engineers (VDI). She began her career in nanotechnology research at CNRS-LTM and CEA-Leti in Grenoble. There she developed and evaluated block copolymer lithography as an alternative to photolithography.