Joël Bacquet is a Senior Official of DG CONNECT of the European Commission, taking care of the research and innovation policy for the Internet of Things. Before working in this field, he was programme officer in "Future Internet Experimental Platforms", head of the sector "Virtual Physiological Human" in the ICT for health domain. From 1999 to 2003, he was head of the sector “networked organisations” in the eBusiness unit. He started working with the European Commission in 1993, in the Software Engineering Unit of the ESPRIT Programme.

He started his carrier as visiting scientist for Quantel a LASER company in San José, California in 1981. From 1983 to 1987, he was with Thomson CSF (Thales) as software development engineer for a Radar System. From 1987 to 1991, he worked with the European Space Agency as software engineer on the European Space shuttle and international Space platform programmes(ISS). From 1991 to 1993 he was with Eurocontrol where he was Quality manager of an Air Traffic Control system.

He is an engineer in computer science from Institut Supérieur d'Electronique du Nord (ISEN) and he has a MBA from Webster University, Missouri.