VentranetAbout Ellen
Ellen Fritsche has been director of the Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicology (SCAHT) since 2024, succeeding Martin F. Wilks, and is an adjunct professor of toxicology at the University of Basel. SCAHT, founded in 2009 and funded by the Swiss Confederation, is a national centre for human toxicology and risk assessment run with the universities of Basel, Geneva and Lausanne and the FHNW School of Life Sciences.
She has worked in toxicology for more than 20 years. Trained as a physician, she spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and qualified as a professor in environmental toxicology. She then spent more than a decade as a full professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and led a research group at the IUF Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine. In 2022 she founded DNTOX, a spin-off of the IUF.
Her research focuses on animal-free test methods for chemical risk assessment, in particular for developmental neurotoxicity, and on bringing them to international acceptance through the OECD. She coordinated the EFSA-DNT project, sits on the German MAK Commission and the OECD expert group on in-vitro DNT testing, and is editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Neurotoxicology. Her work earned the CEFIC LRI Innovative Science Award in 2006 and the Poulsson Prize in 2024.
