Dr. Amelie Ott is an experienced scientist and scientific manager with a track record of leading international projects to assess the environmental safety of chemicals.
She is currently the Director, Environmental Sciences at the International Collaboration on Cosmetics Safety (ICCS) where she is tasked with overseeing the strategic development and tactical management of their environmental science program. ICCS is a global, non-for-profit multi-stakeholder research organization dedicated to advancing animal-free safety assessments for cosmetics, covering human and environmental health.
Before this role, she worked at the European personal care trade association, Cosmetics Europe as an Environmental Sciences Manager and as a scientist at Newcastle University, co-leading the validation and standardization of a new biodegradation method. She also worked as a parliamentary researcher for the UK Parliament and as a scientific secretary consultant for the European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals (ECETOC). She is still a visiting researcher at Newcastle University, representing the UK in an OECD Expert Group. She is an active member of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). She holds a Ph.D. in environmental engineering on emerging contaminants from Newcastle University.

Dr. Gerald Renner was born in Graz (Austria) in 1967. His basic scientific training is in engineering chemistry at the Technische Universität Graz, where he graduated in 1993. After that he specialised in biochemical engineering and worked for his PhD at the Technische Universität Graz, and the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal. He finished his doctoral studies on the bacterial production of biodegradable plastics in 1996. After additional courses in animal cell culture techniques and immunology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, he joined the Colipa (now Cosmetics Europe) Scientific department at the end of 1996. Since 2001 he is Cosmetic Europe’s Director of Technical Regulatory Affairs which includes since 2010 also the association s activities on international regulatory convergence.

After many years of leading the department of In Vitro Toxicology and Dermato-Cosmetology at the VUB in a successful way, Emeritus professor in Toxicology Vera Rogiers is actually still teaching dermato-cosmetics at the VUB and the University of Ghent. She also gives a limited number of lessons to the University of Namur. She yearly organizes international courses on Cosmetics and Risk Assessment. She is the Director of the Innovation Centre-3Rs (IC-3Rs) at the VUB and of the scientific Chair Mireille Aerens, both with focus on replacing experimental animals by novel technologies. At the EU level, she is co-chair of the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) and member of the Mirror group of the European Partnership on Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA). Her main research activity was many years situated in the development of in vitro models as an alternative to the use of experimental animals. Actual focus is on the differentiation of human skin-derived stem cells to functional hepatic cells and their application for drug discovery and the detection of drug-induced liver injury. She has been promoter of 33 doctoral theses, is author or co-author of >380 publications in international peer reviewed scientific journals and is editor of several scientific books. She is an often-invited speaker (>350) and participated in the organization of more than 60 international congresses. She has coordinated 2 EU research projects and was partner in several FP6, FP7 EU and Horizon 2020 research projects concerned with in vitro methodology development. Of the obtained scientific results, several patents have been filed. Throughout her carrier she received several international scientific awards for her pioneering role in in vitro Experimental Toxicology.