Vardit Ravitsky, PhD

Vardit Ravitsky is Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal and part-time Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics and Director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics. She is a 2020 Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Chair of the Foundation’s COVID-19 Impact Committee, as well as Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the Hastings Center. She is member of the Standing Committee on Ethics of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and of the Institute Advisory Board of CIHR’s Institute of Genetics. She is also member of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Genomics & Society Working Group. Her research focuses on the ethics of genomics and reproduction and is funded by Canada’s leading funding agencies. She published over 170 articles and commentaries on bioethical issues.

Ravitsky’s research covers a variety of topics such as: public funding of In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF); the use of surplus frozen embryos; posthumous reproduction; pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD); gamete donation; epigenetics; prenatal testing, in particular the ethical, social and legal aspects of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT); germline and somatic gene editing; and mitochondrial replacement. She holds a BA from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at CIHR’s Ethics Office and a GE3LS consultant to Genome Canada (GE3LS = genomics and its ethical, economic, environmental, legal and social implications).