Profile
Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan is the Executive Director of the Royal Irish Academy where she is responsible for overseeing governance and the strategic agenda of the organisation. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in the Royal College of Surgeons where she teaches Healthcare Ethics and Law to postgraduate students. Dr O’Sullivan was Chief Bioethics Officer in the Department of Health (DoH) from 2011-2022 and led the national ethics response across the health system to COVID-19.
She is a member of the National Immunisation Advisory Committee, an independent expert group that provides evidence-based advice to the Department of Health on vaccines, immunisation and related health matters to inform health policies in Ireland.
From 2017-2020, she was vice-chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) which advises the President of the European Commission. She has been an ethics reviewer for research proposals under European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme and regularly chairs ethics audits of funded research in the field of Medicine, Information Technology and Security for the EC. Dr O’Sullivan was elected Chair of the of the Steering Committee for Human Rights in the fields of Biomedicine and Health (CDBIO) at the Council of Europe in November 2022 and chaired the working group tasked with drafting the strategic action plan for bioethics for the 46 CoE member States for the period 2020-2025.
The RIA Executive Director serves in an ex officio capacity on the DRI Board.
