Dolores Ibarreta Is a Senior Scientific Officer of the European Commission

Dolores Ibarreta is a senior scientific officer of the European Commission. She is a molecular biologist graduated from the University of Maryland (US) with a PhD in Genetics from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Afterwards, she completed a Master of Bioethics Degree from the Center for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Australia. She has worked as a researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas of the Spanish Research Council (CIB-CSIC) in Madrid and at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC (US), with a focus on the molecular pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. Since 1999 she is part of IPTS, one of the institutes of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, where she focuses on the analysis of the socio-economic impacts of emerging health care applications of biotechnologies in Europe, with the aim to support policy formulation as well as policy impact assessments.

Karen Sermon was trained as an MD at the medical school of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. In 1988, she started her research career on the development of PGD for Tay-Sachs disease using enzymatic dosage analyses in human oocytes and embryos. From 1990 on, she went on to develop PGD for Tay-Sachs and other diseases such as myotonic dystrophy by DNA and PCR based analyses and obtained her PhD in 1996. Between 1996 and 2006 she worked as a post doc for the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in the fields of PGD and reproductive genetics, with a focus on the behaviour of triplet expansions, such as in myotonic dystrophy, Huntington’s disease and fragile X, in human gametes and embryos. From 2002 on, under impulse of Prof. Em. A. Van Steirteghem, she started up the laboratory for human embryonic stem cells at the VUB, with a focus on deriving stem cells from embryos shown to be affected after PGD and studying the (epi)genetics of these interesting cells. Since then, eight publications on stem cells left her lab. She was appointed Professor in Human and experimental genetics, embryology and developmental biology in 2004.