Scientific committee

Born in Geneva on August 12, 1946, Jean-Dominique Vassalli obtained his federal medical degree from the University of Geneva in 1972, his doctorate in science (PhD) from Rockefeller University in 1977 and his doctorate in medicine from the University of Geneva in 1984. In 1991, Jean-Dominique Vassalli was appointed Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, a position he held until 1999. He was then appointed vice-rector of the University of Geneva. He held this position until 2003. He was in charge of the files relating to the Vaud-Geneva collaboration and the valorization of scientific discoveries. From 2004 to July 14, 2007, he chaired the Section of Fundamental Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine.

Olaf Blanke is director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; www.lnco.epfl.ch) and neurologist consultant at the Department of Neurology (University Hospital of Geneva).
He pioneered the neuroscientific study of human self-consciousness and subjectivity by using a broad range of methods such as the neuropsychology and electrophysiology of self-consciousness in neurological disease as well as brain imaging in healthy subjects.
His main interest at present is the development of a data-driven neuroscientific theory of self-consciousness and subjectivity. Another main line of research concerns balance and body perception, and their application to engineering-based technologies such as virtual reality, robotics, and neuro-rehabilitation.

Professor Karl Blanchet is the Director of the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies and Professor in Humanitarian Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva.

Hervé Chneiweiss' research focuses on the biology of a particular population of cells of the nervous system, the astrocytes, the main population of glial cells, as well as on the origin and development of brain tumors. The involvement of glial cells in the processing of neural information has long been neglected. Astrocytes constitute half of the brain cells and perform many functions, from the establishment of the brain's architecture to the functioning, at any given moment, of communications between neurons. Moreover, some astrocytes form the adult brain stem cells and most of the so-called neurological diseases are in fact linked to an alteration of the astrocytic function.
The work of Hervé Chneiweiss has made it possible to characterize, on different populations of astrocytes of the central nervous system, numerous receptors and their intracellular effectors, second messengers and newly identified target proteins such as Stathmin or PEA-15, and to describe their functions in protection such as programmed death (apoptosis), entry into the cell cycle or inappropriate motility. More recently, with his collaborators, Hervé Chneiweiss studied the mechanisms linking astrocytes to the genesis and development of brain tumors. They have shown that the overexpression of certain growth factors, such as TGFalpha acting via the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR), causes a disorder of cell differentiation that makes the cell susceptible to tumor transformation. As early as 2002, they characterized tumor stem cells in human brain tumors of children and adults, the analysis of which could lead to the development of new anti-cancer therapeutic strategies.
In the 1990s, Hervé Chneiweiss became fully immersed in ethical issues as a consultant in neurogenetics at the Salpêtrière Hospital, in Yves Agid's department. Passionate about the questions raised by the progress of research, Hervé Chneiweiss, initially a member of ERMES, the ethics committee of Inserm, has been its president since March 2013.  He was also appointed member of the National Consultative Ethics Committee (CCNE). He writes a bioethics column in the journal médecine/sciences, of which he was editor-in-chief from 2006 to 2016.

Dr Costa-Font’s works at LSE as an Associate Professor (Reader) of Political Economy in the Department of Social Policy and the European Institute. Joan has held various visiting and research posts at Harvard University, Boston College, Oxford University and the University of Munich among other universities. His main research and teaching is broadly on issues related to (i) the economics of social policy and (ii) the political economy (including public choice and social economic analysis of) social programs and institutions. Outside LSE he is affiliated to CESIfo and the Health Econometrics and Data group.

Antoine Flahault MD, PhD in biomathematics. He was appointed as full professor of public health in 2002. He was the founding director of the French School of Public Health (EHESP, Rennes, 2007-2012), co-director of Centre Virchow-Villermé for Public Health Paris-Berlin (Université Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité), co-director of the European Academic Global Health Alliance (EAGHA),and  president of the Agency for Public Health Education Accreditation (APHEA).
He conducted  research in mathematical modelling of communicable diseases, chaired the WHO collaborative centre for electronic disease surveillance, and coordinated research on Chikungunya in Indian Ocean (Inserm Prize, 2006; was scientific curator of a large exhibition Epidemik, la Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (Paris, Rio and Sao Paulo)). In January 2014, he was appointed as professor of public health at School of Medicine, University of Geneva where he is the founding director of the Institute of Global Health. He was elected corresponding member at Académie Nationale de Médecine (Paris). In January 2014, he had more than 235 scientific publication referenced in Medline.

Ua Gudnadottir holds a Bachelor's degree in Medicine, a Bachelor's degree in Law and an interdisciplinary Master's degree in Living Law from the University of Geneva. His current research focuses on medically assisted procreation.

Torsten H. Voigt is a professor of sociology and chair of technology and
diversity at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He is also a member of the
scientific committee on science studies at the Germany Ministry of
Education and Research.

Samia Hurst is a physician bioethicist, ethics consultant for the Clinical Ethics Council at the Geneva University Hospitals and director of the Clinical Ethics Unit of the Lausanne University Hospitals, and chair of the Institute for Ethics, History, and the Humanities at Geneva University’s medical school in Switzerland. She is a member of the Senate at the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, of the Ethical Legal Social Issues advisory group du Swiss Personalised Health Network, and of the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics. Her research focuses on fairness in clinical practice and the protection of vulnerable persons.

BARTHA MARIA KNOPPERS, PhD, is Director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University, Canada Research Chair in Law and Medicine 2001- and the holder of Chaire d’excellence Pierre Fermat (France) (2006-2008), she was named Distinguished Visiting Scientist (Netherlands Genomics Initiative) (2009-2011).
Formerly, Professor at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal (1985-2009) and Senior Researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public (C.R.D.P.) (1996-2009). Graduate of McMaster University (B.A.), University of Alberta (M.A.), McGill University (LL.B., B.C.L.), Cambridge University, U.K., (D.L.S.), Sorbonne Paris I) (Phd.) she was admitted to the Bar of Québec in 1985.
Professor Knoppers was the former, Chair of the International Ethics committee of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), (1996-2004), and member of the International Bioethics Committee of the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which drafted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (1993-1997).
Co-Founder of the International Institute of Research in Ethics and Biomedicine (IIREB) (2000 – 2009), she founded the Population Project in Genomics (P3G) and CARTaGENE in 2003. From 2000-2006 she served on the Board of Genome Canada, became Chair of the Ethics Working Party of the International Stem Cell Forum, Co-Chair of the Sampling/ELSI Committee of the 1000 Genomes Project (2008-) and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) (2009-).
Professor Knoppers received a Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from the University of Waterloo (2001), a Doctor of Medicine Honoris Causa from Université de Paris V (René Descartes) (2002), a Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from McMaster University, Ontario (2007) and a Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from the University of Alberta in 2008. In 2002, she was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, selected as one of the 50 nation builders in Canada by the Globe and Mail, and named Officer of the Order of Canada. In that same year, she was elected Fellow of The Hastings Center (Bioethics), New York, member of the International Ethics Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency and, in April 2005, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS). She was elected Governor of the Quebec Bar in 2006 and in 2007 was elected Advocatus Emeritus. In 2011, she received the ACFAS Prix Jacques Rousseau for interdisciplinarity.

Florencia Luna, M.A, Ph D.  Principal  Researcher at  CONICET (National Scientific and Technological Research Council), Argentina.  Director of the Program of bioethics at FLACSO (Latin American University of Social Sciences). President of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) (2003-2005).  Expert for the World Health Organization (WHO) and member of the Scientific and Advisory Committee (STAC) of the Department of Tropical Diseases Research (TDR) from WHO (2011-2014).  She has also published articles in national and international journals. Author of several books, including Bioethics and Vulnerability: A Latin American View (2006).

Dr. Johann A R Roduit is a founding partner of Conexkt, an international innovation agency, and an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich. He completed his doctoral thesis on the ethics of human enhancement. His research interests include human & moral enhancement, bioethics, transhumanism, virtue ethics, the ethics of big data, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Professor Michael Selgelid is the Director of the Monash Bioethics Centre (formerly named Centre for Human Bioethics), and he also regularly provides expert advice to a number of international bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO).
Last year, Professor Selgelid was commissioned to write a White Paper for the US Government on the ethics of ‘gain-of-function research’, and in 2016 he contributed to discussions relating to the response to the Zika virus in Latin America with the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO).
Monash Arts spoke to him about his work and how bioethics and ethical considerations play into large-scale health crises.

Director of Belgium College and of the College of the Alumni of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Marie-Josée Simoen until 2008 was also the General Secretary of the Fund for Scientific Research - FNRS Belgium (FRS-FNRS) and its associated Funds (1988 -2008), Interuniversity Institute for Nuclear Sciences (IISN)-Fund of Medical Scientific Research (FRSM)-Basic Research Fund Collective initiative of researchers (FRFC)-Fund for Research Training in Industry and Agriculture (FRIA)

Stéphanie Dagron is professor of law at the University of Geneva, teaching international health and social security law. She has a double appointment at the Faculty of law and the Faculty of medicine and she is attached to both the Global Studies Institute and the Institute of global health. Since September 2022, she is also the director of the Master of science in global health.

Prof Jane Kaye is the Director of the Centre for Law, Health and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) in
the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and also has a Professorship at Melbourne Law School
at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Professor Kaye obtained her degrees from the Australian
National University (BA); University of Melbourne (LLB); and University of Oxford (DPhil). Her
research team consist of lawyers and sociologists who use mixed-method empirical approaches to
explore the relationships between law, governance and best practice in the field of emerging
technologies in health. The main focus of Professor Kaye’s research is on digital technologies,
personalised medicine, biobanks, privacy, informational governance, dynamic consent and
translational research. She has worked with colleagues to secure a total of UK£95m in grants in
interdisciplinary projects and has personally been awarded >£6M. Professor Kaye is the lead PI on
the AIDE project, which is identifying ways to engage stakeholders in the implementation of AI in
healthcare (ESRC 2019-23). She has published two books, 165 articles and 6 commissioned policy
reports for the Welcome Trust, the European Commission, and the Australian Commonwealth
Government. She is on a number of scientific advisory boards and editorial boards.

Dr. Stéphanie Perruchoud is a Swiss ethicist and philosopher. After a PhD thesis on the place of man in nature focusing on the works of Merleau-Ponty, she specialized in the field of the ethics of vulnerability and more precisely on the notion of the vulnerable body. She has thus submitted several successful projects on aging and disability for which she received, among others, the prestigious Marie-Curie Actions grant. She is currently working as a research fellow at the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en éthique (UNIL) on a project studying the interaction between a social robot and an elderly person in a long-term care institution at the anthropological and ethical level (IPARC financed by the Leenaards Foundation and PASOR financed by the Swiss National Fund).

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