LIST announces appointment of new CEO

Esch/Belval – By unanimous decision, the Board of Directors of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) has appointed 48-year-old Swedish national Dr Thomas Kallstenius as new CEO. He will take up his functions at Luxembourg’s biggest Research and Technology Organization (RTO) on 1 February 2019.

Thomas Kallstenius was the first choice of LIST’s Board of Directors, having incontrovertibly demonstrated all the qualities necessary to advance LIST’s position among the most renowned RTOs in Europe. LIST’s future CEO has a clear international outlook with extensive experience in industrial RDI and a 20-year career spanning multiple countries.

Before signing with LIST, Thomas Kallstenius was research program director at imec, a world-leading RTO in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. In this position, he oversaw a research programme on security and privacy, in collaboration with KU Leuven, encompassing a much-acclaimed team of over 140 researchers specializing in cryptography, hardware security, privacy, access control and distributed systems. He was also involved in imec’s strategic activities in distributed artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Prior to joining imec, Thomas Kallstenius was vice president for research and innovation at iMinds, the research institute that merged with imec in 2016. His responsibilities in this role included iMinds’ strategic and applied research programs with academic and industrial partners.

Thomas Kallstenius’ previous experience includes positions as director at Bell Labs on video communication related topics, as strategic marketing director at Alcatel-Lucent and as researcher on broadband access within Ericsson Research as well as on reliability of semiconductor components within Ericsson Microelectronics.

Thomas Kallstenius holds a Masters Degree in Engineering Physics from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, a PhD in semiconductor materials science from Uppsala University and an MBA from Vlerick Management School in Leuven, Belgium. He has served as a Member of the Board of Directors of the FTTH Council Europe, and as vice-chair of the Working Group on Wearables in the European Commission’s Alliance of Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI).