Download Dolores Ibarreta is a senior scientific officer of the European

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.