Virginie Pirard

Virginie Pirard is a lawyer and philosopher (ULB), specialized in bioethics and research ethics (including epidemic ethics). Since December 2023, she has been a member of the Bureau of the Advisory Committee on Bioethics, and she will assume the presidency of the Committee starting December 11, 2025, for one year.

An experienced member of the Committee, she has served as rapporteur for several opinions and chaired several select committees, including the one on COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic (term 2018–2022) and the one on Euthanasia during the current term (2023–2027).

As a philosopher and ethicist, she conducts academic research at ULB on the growing impact of bioethics worldwide and on the role and legitimacy of ethics committees. She has more than 15 years of expertise as a member or chairwoman of various ethics committees (Bioethics, Research, Hospital Care).

Highly active internationally, she recently completed, in collaboration with seven international partners (representing four continents) and as co-lead with philosopher Marie-Geneviève Pinsart, a project (coordinated by ULB) funded by WHO aimed at integrating ethics committees into the response to climate change (project R(H)OPE – The Right to an Open Future). 

She also finalized in 2025 a report on “the ethical evaluation of scientific research in the universities of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles” - https://wp-pindare.cref.be/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/RapportCoARA-Evaluation-ethique_VirginiePirard.pdf - as part of the FWB-COARA project, a collaborative initiative among the five French-speaking universities of Belgium. She is currently involved in “Responsible Research” actions within the “Research” department at ULB.

She also teaches ethics and professional conduct to healthcare professionals at the Haute École Libre de Bruxelles Ilya Prigogine (HELB). 

In the past, she worked as a bioethics advisor in the cabinet of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Health (Belgium), and between 2012 and 2021, she worked in France as an ethicist and later as head of the Ethics Unit (which she created) in a leading research institution, the Institut Pasteur (Paris).