Gert Jan Koopman is the Director General of DG NEAR, as of January 2023. He was previously the Director General for DG BUDGET. He was also Deputy Director General for State Aids at the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP). In this capacity he was responsible for the Commission's control of State Aids and the co-ordination of the 1000 State Aid cases managed by thirteen units in DG COMP. Prior to this Gert Jan Koopman was Director for "Policy Strategy and Co-ordination" and before that for the "Economic Service and Structural Reform" Directorate at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) which he joined on 1 May 2008. In this capacity, he led the work on the structural reform agenda and provided economic advice to all Commission services. Mr Koopman was also a member of the Commission's Impact Assessment Board which vets all Impact Assessments produced by Commission departments. He joined DG ECFIN from the Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry where he was Director for the “Industrial policy and economic reforms” from 1 January 2005. He worked on Industrial Policy and Better Regulation – notably the management of the Commission's Action Programme to reduce Administrative Burdens by 25% by 2012. From 1995 to 2004, Gert Jan Koopman advised Commissioner Neil Kinnock, initially as a Member of his Cabinet with responsibility for Transport and later as Head of Cabinet when Mr Kinnock was Vice-President for Administrative Reform. He studied Economics and Latin and Greek at the University of Amsterdam and worked as a Researcher and Policy adviser for the University of Utrecht and the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis before joining the European Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs in 1991. He was born in 1966, is a Dutch national and lives with his family in Brussels.