Jerzy Buzek
Jerzy Karol Buzek (born 3 July 1940 in Śmiłowice - currently in the Czech Republic) is a Polish engineer, academic lecturer and politician who was the ninth post-Cold War Prime Minister of Poland from 1997 to 2001. He has been a member of the European Parliament since 13 June 2004, and was President of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2012. After the Second World War, his family moved to Chorzów. In 1963 Jerzy Buzek graduated from the Mechanics-and-Energy Division of the Silesian University of Technology, specialising in chemical engineering. He became a scientist in the Chemical Engineering Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 1997 he has been a professor of technical science. He is also an honorary doctor of the universities in Seoul and Dortmund. From 1997 to 2001, Buzek was a coalition Prime Minister of Poland. After losing the parliamentary elections in 2001, he stepped back from political life and focused more on his scientific work, becoming the prorector of Akademia Polonijna in Częstochowa and professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Opole University of Technology in Opole. His return to political life in 2004 saw him gain the largest popular vote in Poland as the member for Katowice to the European Parliament standing for the Civic Platform. Whilst President of the European Parliament, on 30 March 2011, he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the IChemE at a meeting of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) in Brussels, Belgium. On 14 July 2009, Buzek was elected President of the European Parliament with 555 votes of the 644 votes cast, the largest majority ever,[8] becoming the first person from the former Eastern Bloc and the first former Prime Minister since Pierre Pflimlin to gain that position.
