Alexandra Allgeier's grandfather
1935 – 2025
Born 13 October 1935 in Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Bavaria. Died 10 February 2025.
“I must reserve a particular mention for Herbert Allgeier. If any one person could be called the Father of Copernicus it is he.”
“His rigour, pioneering spirit and keen sense of the public interest had a profound influence on European scientific research.”
Herbert Allgeier was a mechanical engineer who spent twenty-five years at the European Commission building the research policy of the European Union. He joined in 1976, when the Community had no research programme worth the name, and retired in 2000 as Director-General of the Joint Research Centre, the Commission’s own science service.
Along the way he helped shape the first Research Framework Programme, founded the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, led the Commission’s work on aeronautics and space, and convened the meeting that became Copernicus, today the largest Earth-observation programme in the world.
He was my grandfather, and for as long as I can remember he was the person I talked to about Europe. He had spent his working life inside the institutions I was studying, and he could explain, from the inside, why a programme existed, which fights had been worth having, and what a good public servant actually does all day. He was patient with a student’s questions and impatient with lazy answers.
Moving to Brussels to work on EU policy is the most direct thing I have taken from him. He was a mentor before I knew to call him one, and this site carries his name because the path it describes starts with him.
Alexandra Allgeier
In May 1998 the JRC’s remote-sensing institute held its annual scientific meeting at Baveno on Lake Maggiore. As Director-General he used the occasion to host a lunch for the heads of Europe’s space agencies and the Earth-observation industry. Those present agreed to act, and the document they drafted over the following months, the Baveno Manifesto of 19 May 1998, founded Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. It was renamed Copernicus in 2012.
The quotation at the top of this page is from Geoff Sawyer, then Secretary General of the European Earth-observation industry association and one of the drafters, writing after the twentieth-anniversary meeting at Baveno in 2018.
1958 – 1963
Nuclear engineering in industry
MAN, Germany · GEC, United Kingdom
After a degree in mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich.
1963 – 1976
Euratom
Brussels · Detroit
Three of those years at the Enrico Fermi fast breeder reactor in Detroit.
1976 – 1985
Scientific advisor to the Director-General for Research
European Commission
Managed the reorganisation of the Joint Research Centre in the early 1980s.
1985 – 1987
Cabinet of Vice-President Karl-Heinz Narjes
European Commission
Responsible for research and technology as the first Framework Programme, ESPRIT and EUREKA took shape.
1987 – 1994
Director, research collaboration and scientist mobility; then energy research
European Commission
1994 – 1996
Founding Director, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
Seville
Moved the institute to Seville and gave it its role as the Commission’s technology-foresight arm. It is still there, as JRC Seville.
1997 – 1998
Director, Task Force Aeronautics and Space Coordination Group
European Commission
The groundwork for a European space policy.
1998 – 2000
Director-General, Joint Research Centre
European Commission
Retired 31 October 2000.
2011
Honorary Member, Académie de l’air et de l’espace
Toulouse
European University Institute, Florence. His career, post by post.
The French Air and Space Academy, of which he was an honorary member.
CORDIS, the Commission’s research news service.
Geoff Sawyer for EARSC, 2018. The account of the 1998 lunch.
Historical Archives of the European Union. Transcripts open.