Portrait picture of Dafna Feinholz Klip with curly hair standing beside the United Nations flag. She wears a patterned jacket over a teal shirt and a necklace with a dark pendant. The background is plain white, keeping the focus on the person and the flag.
Feinholz
Dafna

Director a.i. Division of Research, Ethics and Inclusion, Chief of Section Bioethics and Ethics of Science and Technology Section Social and Human Sciences Sector, UNESCO

Dafna Feinholz has a PhD in Research Psychology (UIA Mexico) and a Master in Bioethics (Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain). She was the Head of the Reproductive Epidemiology Department at the Mexican National Institute of Perinatology, and the Director for Research and Planning of the Women and Health Program, at the Ministry of Health (Mexico). She successively occupied the posts of Academic Coordinator of the National Commission of Human Genome at the Ministry of Health and Executive Director of the National Commission of Bioethics.

Among her achievements, she ensured a more independent legal status for the National Bioethics Committees (NBC); contributed to define their mission as promoters of a bioethics culture; encouraged them to provide the society and decision-makers with the necessary elements to understand and tackle ethical issues. She drafted the first national guidelines for Research Ethics Committees and Clinical Bioethics Committees and promoted the law that established and differentiated both types of committees (law approved and currently in vigor).

She is the founder of FLACEIS (Latin American Forum of Ethics Committees in Health Research) and was the Chairperson (2000-2006). She was a member of the international expert group, TDR-WHO: drafting and translating Operational Guidelines for Ethics Committees. She was Mexico´s representative at the meetings of the Intergovernmental Bioethics Committee to discuss UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

Since September 2009, Dafna Feinholz is the Chief of the Bioethics and Ethics of Science Section, within UNESCO’s Social and Human Science Sector. In this capacity, she leads different activities aiming at reinforcing capacities of Member States to manage bioethical challenges and to identify the ethical, legal and social implications of cutting-edge science, emerging technologies and their application for sustainable development, and promoting awareness-raising and public debate. She has played a leading role in the revision of the UNESCO recommendation of Science and Scientific Researchers, the elaboration and adoption of the Declaration of ethical principles of climate change, and the recently adopted Recommendation on the Ethics of AI. She is responsible for oversight of the secretariat of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC), the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), the Intergovernmental Bioethics Committee (IGBC) and the UN Inter-Agency Committee on Bioethics (UNIACB). She is also currently playing a leading role in preparing the UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of neurotechnology.