Pablo Perez-Illana

Pablo PEREZ-ILLANA is Aeronautical Engineer by the Polytechnical University of Madrid, where he conducted research on fluid dynamics and aero-engines.

He worked five years as Flight Dynamics engineer from GMV company, mostly at the European Space Agency’s operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, for MARS-EXPRESS – the first ESA mission to Mars, and ROSETTA – the first mission to pose onto a comet.

In 2004 he joined the European Commission, mostly dealing with aeronautics breakthrough innovation, safety and international collaboration. He oversaw above a hundred research & innovation projects in all aeronautic fields. He acted as the first call coordinator for Clean Sky Joint Undertaking as well.

Since 2021 he is deputy head of unit for Horizon Europe transport at the agency CINEA – in secondment from the European Commission. His portfolio includes aviation collaborative research and public-private partnerships with automotive, maritime and batteries industries. His unit counts with 36 staff and around 3-billion-euro in EU funding.

CINEA is one of the largest EU executive agencies with more than 65 billion euro in EU funding via very complementary EU programmes. CINEA covers all the innovation chain:

• from idea inception to large-scale demonstration – via Horizon Europe,
• from scale-up vehicle production to market implementation – via Innovation Fund,
• from energy to transport infrastructures – via Connecting Europe Facility.