Culture and sports

Gerda has more than six years’ experience in policy research, evaluations and technical assistance projects. Her key area of expertise is in the intersection of education and the labour market, focusing in particular on vocational education and skills policies. She has experience in leading research projects, as well as significant expertise in various qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. At PPMI, she has been involved in a number of research projects for the European Commission and EU agencies.

Rimantas has worked as a public policy researcher, evaluator and public management consultant since 2001. His fields of expertise include education and training, social inclusion, labour market policies and good governance. Rimantas is an experienced manager with a strong track record of working with and leading multinational teams of experts and researchers. He has worked for a variety of public sector clients including national authorities, the European Commission, the EU and UN agencies. Most of Rimantas’ assignments have been within the EU, but many have also focused on EU candidate and neighbourhood countries, as well as other countries undergoing social and economic transformations.

Vitalis has been a partner in PPMI since 2003. He currently holds the position of Director of Research and Policy Advice. His main responsibility at PPMI is in evaluation and policy analysis, public administration and governance. Vitalis has around 20 years of research experience, with around 15 years’ experience in evaluations and studies conducted for EU institutions, agencies and other public authorities. He has been involved in more than 60 PPMI projects, and has been team leader in around 30 of them.

Vitalis is also employed as a professor in public administration at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University, where he researches and teaches public administration and public policy. He is involved in the activities of various government commissions and working groups.

Donatas has more than 14 years’ experience in conducting Europe-wide studies, evaluations of various public policy initiatives, and providing policy advice to Directorates-General of the European Commission (DG EAC, DG EMPL and others) and EU agencies (Cedefop, ETF, Eurofound). His main topics of interest include vocational education and training, higher education and its European dimension, education financing, skills policy, culture and sport, as well as the evaluation of EU agencies. Donatas is also an experienced communications evaluator, with more than six years’ experience in evaluating communications, stakeholder engagement and organisations’ networking policies, communication campaigns and strategies in various policy areas. He has also conducted research on user experience and usability testing, relating in particular to publications and websites managed by the European Commission. He has also managed several EU funded framework contracts.