Dr. Gerard de Nazelle is the current Director of Saudi Aramco’s R&D Center, having joined Aramco in September 2019, as part of the Technology Oversight & Coordination Management Team. He was previously at Reliance Industries, where he was Head of Technology from 2014 to 2019.

From 2010 to 2014, as an entrepreneur, Gerard was the CEO of Polygenta Technologies in India: Polygenta won the Financial Times – International Finance Corporation Award (FT-IFC) of the “Sustainable Investment of the Year 2012”.

Before joining Polygenta, from 2009 he was a Director at the European Commission within the European Union (EU), and served as the first Director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), to contribute to the improvement of Europe’s innovation performances.

Prior to this his background was with Shell, where he joined in 1990 as the Global Manager: Innovation & Research; responsible for the development of new technology options for all Shell businesses, and clean energy futures. In 1994, he moved to Japan, then to Singapore, where he participated in the construction and start-up of two large petrochemical projects (1996 - 2003). He held the position of Technology Manager of Shell (Singapore), before becoming Chief Technologist of the multi-billion CNOOC-Shell project in China (2004-2007).

He holds an MSc degree (Chem. Eng.) from ENSIC (France) and a PhD (Physics) from Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands).