Richard “Dick” Gupwell is Chairman of the Administrative Board and a co-founder of the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS). He has spent much of his professional life in Brussels, serving as an administrator in the Secretariat-General of the European Commission before joining the Secretariat of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament in 1976. There, he advised members of the Parliament’s Committee on External Economic Relations—now the Committee on International Trade—and acted as Secretary to the Socialist Group’s Working Party on South and South-East Asia.
His work with the European Parliament’s delegations to India, South Asia and Southeast Asia helped inspire the establishment of the European Institute for Asian Studies in 1989.