The Network Council
Due to the expansion of the ETSN it became necessary to elect a Network Council in order to represent and coordinate the affairs of the Network the most effective way. The first Network Council election process took place in 2016.
The first Network Council (2017-2018) members were:
Antonios Apostolou (GR), Csilla Fuszek (HU), Prof. Mojca Juriševič (SI), Colm O’Reilly (IE), Prof. Albert Ziegler (DE)
The 2nd Network Council (2019-2020) members were:
Antonios Apostolou (GR), Csilla Fuszek (HU), Prof. Mojca Juriševič (SI), Colm O’Reilly (IE), Prof. Albert Ziegler (DE)
The 3rd Network Council (2021-2022) members were:
Antonios Apostolou (GR), Prof. Africa Borges (ES), Csilla Fuszek (HU), Desirée Houkema (NL), Colm O’Reilly (IE)
The 4th (current) Network Council (2025-2026) members are:
Csilla Fuszek (HU), Bettina Harder (DE), Prof. Mojca Juriševič (SI), Robert Kelemen (HR), Colm O’Reilly (IE),
There short CV can be found below:
NETWORK COUNCIL (2025-2026)
Csilla Fuszek worked for over 15 years as a teacher / lecturer in secondary and in higher education. Since 2000 she has been focused and become specialized in the field of gifted and talented education. As a civil servant she worked for 7 years as a managing director of nationwide talent development programs aimed to promote equal opportunities to the disadvantaged strata of society. Between 2007 and 2011 she was the managing director of Foundation for gifted students. Since 2009 she has been working for the Association of Hungarian Talent Support Organizations. She was responsible for establishing international connections and for collecting best practices outside and inside Europe. From 2012 she is the founding director of the European Talent Centre – Budapest. The Centre became one of the first 14 European Talent Centres in 2015. She organized 4 major European talent support conferences in 2006, 2011, 2014, 2021. She was elected as the coordinator of ETSN in 2016 and became the member of the first Network Council.
Bettina Harder is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Chair of Educational Psychology and Research on Excellence at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. She is vice-director of the South German Talent Centre which subsumes several research projects and provides support to the gifted through counseling and fostering programs. She has been counseling the gifted and their families for over a decade to help them reach their desired outcomes. Her research projects focus ongiftedness and the development of achievement excellence in various contexts and age-groups taking a system-theoretical perspective. She has published books, chapters, and articles in the fields of talent development, excellence, counseling, and educational psychology and has served on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals.
Mojca Juriševič, PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychology at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research focuses on motivation to learn, teachers’ professional development and studies on giftedness and gifted education. She is the founder and director of the Centre for Research and Promotion of Giftedness at the Faculty of Education. She is also a founding member of the European Talent Support Network and a national delegate of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children; she is an elected member of its Executive Committee 2022-2025. Juriševič is a member of the Executive Committee of the Slovenian Psychologists’ Association. Since 2018, she serves as a national representative for the Standing Committee on Psychology in Education of the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations. She is a full member of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation and an associate member of the American Psychological Association. In 2020, Juriševič was honoured with the National Outstanding Achievement Award for Higher Education and in 2023 with the Congress Ambassador of Slovenia for successfully leading the scientific committee of the 17th European Congress of Psychology.
Robert Kelemen is a RITHA/ECHA Specialist in Gifted Education and has a Master’s Degree in Information Science. Since 2013, he has been participating in the organisation of the Centres of Excellence in Varaždin County. He has been developing IT programmes for high-ability elementary school students. He explores teaching for creativity in educational settings related to applying information technology in teaching. In 2019, he became the Deputy Head of the European Talent Centre Croatia—Centres of Excellence of the Varazdin County. He coordinates the development and enhancement of the high-ability programmes of all Varaždin County’s centres and international cooperation. Since 2021 he has been an Ethical Committee Member, and since 2022, he has been a General Committee Member of ECHA. His main motivation is creating a supportive environment for high-ability students, enabling them to be identified, supporting their needs, and further developing their abilities.
Colm O’Reilly is the Director of the Irish Centre for Talented Youth since 2004. He started his work as an academic coordinator in the same Centre in 1998. The Centre provides fast paced classes for academically talented students aged 6 – 16 years from all over Ireland and overseas. currently the Centre caters for over 5000 students per annum, has a budget over 2 million EUR/year, and it became a European Talent Centre in 2015. Colm has worked in the area of gifted and talented education for the last 19 years, has presented papers at numerous conferences and has published in many gifted education journals. He designed over 200 courses for gifted children in numerous academic fields, and developed a program for gifted disadvantaged students at Dublin City University that has won numerous national and international rewards. Colm is actively participating in the work of ECHA, was the organizer of the 2018 ECHA Conference. He became the Secretary of ECHA in March 2016 and the President of ECHA in 2024.
