Aquatic and Terrestrial Ecotoxicology and Risk Management

Anne Alix joined Dow AgroSciences, now Corteva Agriscience, in 2011, as Policy and Risk Management Leader for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She has been working in the area of plant protection products risk assessment for 20 years. After a PhD in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) at the University of Rennes, Anne joined the French National Institute for Research in Agronomy (INRA) as an ecotoxicologist in the scientific unit for the risk assessment of crop protection products. Anne was nominated head of the Environment and Ecotoxicology risk assessment unit at the French Agency on the safety of Food (AFSSA, now ANSES), where she initiated scientific collaborations with the pesticide unit of EFSA. Anne then joined the French Ministry of Agriculture as the deputy head of the Section for Regulation of Plant Protection Products and fertilizers, in charge of the implementation of risk mitigation measures for pesticides and of post registration monitoring.

Roman Ashauer is Eco-modelling Lead at Syngenta. Previously he was Associate Professor at the University of York, UK, where he led a research group until 2018. He has won several awards for his research on effect modelling for environmental risk assessment of chemicals.

Amy Brooks is a regulatory ecotoxicologist with more than ten years’ experience in environmental risk assessment. As Head of the Regulatory Risk Assessment team at Cambridge Environmental Assessments, she provides technical, strategic and regulatory leadership to risk assessment and ecotoxicology functions across thew company. Prior to joining CEA in 2014, she worked as a senior ecotoxicology consultant at a multi-national consultancy, providing ecotoxicology support for pesticide submissions at the national and European level. Before entering the private sector, Amy worked at the Chemicals Regulation Directorate (part of HSE, the UK regulatory authority), evaluating pesticide and biocide dossiers for both active substances and formulated products.

Bas Buddendorf is an Ecological Modeller, whose primary focus is on the integration of fate and effect models. Outputs from this work can be used to, for example, develop new approaches for risk assessment and scenario development at landscape scales.

Pierre-François Chaton is Deputy Head of the Ecotoxicology and Environmental Fate Unit and a senior risk assessor in ecotoxicology at the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES). He has more than 16 years of experience in regulatory risk assessment of plant protection products, including method development.

Jens Dauber is a biologist with a specialisation on landscape ecology and agroecology. He is the Director of the Thünen Institut of Biodiversity and Professor for Biodiversity of Agricultural Landscapes at the TU Braunschweig.

Peter Dohmen recently retired from his position as a Senior Ecotoxicologist at the Agricultural Research Centre of BASF in Limburgerhof/Germany. Having occupied this position for several decades, he brings along profound knowledge and experience in the ecotoxicology field and now works as an independent consultant.

Virginie Ducrot is the Head of the Ecotoxicology Group at Bayer Crop Science and has over 15 years of research experience ecotoxicology. Having worked as scientist in the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAe), as external expert for the PPR Panel at EFSA, and as member of the VMG-eco panel at OECD, she has promoted innovative methods in ecotoxicology (aquatic, terrestrial plants) and effect modelling for the environmental risk assessment of chemicals.

Michael Faupel is the Deputy Head of the Regulatory Strategies Department at Rifcon in Germany. He holds a PhD from Bielefeld University and has previously led Rifcon’s Ecotoxicology Team.

Joost Lahr is a Senior Expert for Water Quality at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Joost has a background in environmental science and ecotoxicology. He has previously worked as Environmental scientist/Ecologist at Wageningen Environmental Research, as an ecotoxicologist for the environmental consultancy AquaSense/Grontmij and for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Senegal as an Expert in Ecotoxicology and Hydrobiology.

Mariana Ledesma has been working as a Regulatory Ecotoxicologist at the Swedish Chemicals Agency (KEMI) conducting ecotoxicology data evaluation and risk assessment, since 2009. As Swedish representative for the Northern Zone in the ecotoxicology section for plant protection products, she has led the work with the interim approach for bees as well as participated in the break-out group responsible for the update of the Higher tier for birds and mammals.

Emily McVey is an experienced Regulatory Toxicologist and works as a Risk Assessor in ecotoxicology at the Ctgb. Her specialties include environmental toxicology, wild vertebrates (birds, mammals, amphibians, fish), molecular mechanisms of toxicity, neurodevelopmental toxicity and endocrine disruption testing and assessment.

Karin M. Nienstedt leads the Sector Pesticides - Placing on the Market in the Unit Pesticides and Biocides, European Commission (Directorate General for Health and Food Safety). Before joining the European Commission she worked for the European Food Safety Authority and as a researcher in the areas crop protection, ecotoxicology, and biological control.

Rachel Sharp is a Regulatory Ecotoxicologist with 18 years of experience. The first 7 years of her career were spent working in the UK competent authority for pesticides whilst the last 11 years have been in the Pesticides Unit of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). She has an in-depth knowledge of the EU Regulatory framework for the assessment of pesticides and wide experience of risk assessment. In recent years she has been scientific coordinator for the update of the EFSA guidance document for the risk assessment of birds and mammals to pesticides.

Edward Straw is a Post-doctoral Researcher at Trinity College Dublin. He works on the impacts of pesticides on bee health, specifically co-formulants and adjuvant and their impacts on bumblebees. He finished his PhD at Royal Holloway University of London in 2020, worked on the PROTECTS project at University College Dublin through 2021, and now has Irish Research Council funding to pursue his own research goals. He is looking to improve how we regulate pesticides by understanding the contributions of overlooked pesticide ingredients to overall formulation toxicity. His work has focussed on co-formulants in herbicides and fungicides. Edward also publishes on the impacts of glyphosate on bees.

Manuela Trobej is a Senior Expert in the field of ecotoxicology at the Austrian Agency of Health and Food Safety (AGES), where she is responsible for the evaluation and assessment of plant protection products. She specialises mixture toxicity risk assessment, computational toxicology and the evaluation of endocrine disrupting properties of active substances.

Jacoba Wassenberg is an environmental risk assessor at the dutch Ctgb, specialized in assessing the ecotoxicological risk of plant protection products to bees, birds and mammals.