Dr Itziar de Lecuona takes over as director of the Bioethics and Law Observatory, a research centre of the University of Barcelona

Within the framework of the 15th International Seminar of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics of the University of Barcelona, Dr María Casado –the founder and director of the Bioethics and Law Observatory (OBD) since it was created– has announced the appointment of Dr Itziar de Lecuona as the new director of the OBD.

Itziar de Lecuona (Barcelona, 1976) has a PhD in Law and a Master’s degree in Bioethics and Law from the University of Barcelona (UB). She began her academic career at the UB in 2001. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Academic Secretary of the UB Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Since 2014, Dr De Lecuona has been the deputy director of the OBD, where she has contributed to create and consolidate lines of research and teaching in bioethics, as well as the centre’s international projection.

Dr de Lecuona has achieved excellent merits in university research, teaching, knowledge transfer and management: she has two acknowledged six-year periods of research and the highest qualification (AA) according to the University of Barcelona’s Academic Dedication Plan. She is work package leader of the ethical, legal and social aspects of two European projects (Horizon 2020) in the field of biomedicine, as well as other non-competitive research projects. She has published monographs and articles in journals indexed in the main quality repositories; she has been a speaker at international conferences of renowned prestige in bioethics and a visiting researcher at the UNESCO Bioethics Programme in Paris, the University of Bologna’s CIRSFID Bioethics Research Centre, and the Carlos III Institute of Health in Madrid. Since 2012, Dr De Lecuona has been a member of the Research Integrity Policy Group of the prestigious League of European Research Universities (LERU), on behalf of the University of Barcelona. A former member of the Ethics Committee of Catalonia and of the Hospital Clínic’s Research Ethics Committee in Barcelona, she is currently a member of the UB’s Bioethics Committee, and of the Ethics Committee of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the IDIBELL Research Integrity Committee, and the Ministry of Science and Innovation’s Multidisciplinary Working Group (GTM) on scientific matters related to COVID-19.

We wish Dr de Lecuona all the very best in her new post, and that under her direction the OBD will continue to be a nationally and internationally acknowledged point of reference in bioethics.