Prof Raffaella Ravinetto is an Italian-Belgian pharmacist with thirty years’ experience in commercial and non-commercial clinical research, humanitarian programmes, pharmaceutical policies, and research ethics review.

She holds a University Master’s Degree in Pharmacy from the University of Torino, Italy (1991); a Postgraduate Diploma in Tropical Medical Biology from the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM), Antwerp, Belgium (2002); and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the KU Leuven, Belgium (2016).

After seven years’ as Clinical Research Scientist in the private pharmaceutical sector, she worked as a pharmacist in humanitarian programs run by different NGOs in the Balkans and in Africa. In 2002 she joined Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), where she held different positions, focusing on access to/quality of essential medicines, while performing several field assessments in Africa and Latin America (later on, she would become the president of MSF Italy, from 2007 to 2011). From 2006 to 2016, she was the head of the Clinical Trials Unit of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) Antwerp, which coordinated or supported non-commercial collaborative clinical trials addressing health problems of low- and middle-income countries. During this period, she was also the scientific coordinator of QUAMED (Quality Medicines for All), a non-for-profit initiative that aims at assuring the quality of medicines in humanitarian and development programmes.

She is currently an associate professor at the Public Health Department of the ITM, in charge of a portfolio of research, policy support, networking, education and policy support in pharmaceutical public health. Besides it, she is the chairperson of the ITM Institutional Review Board; the chairperson of the MSF Ethics Review Board; and an associated editor of the BMC Medical Ethics. Since 2018 Raffaella has collaborated with SOPH as part of SOPH’s partnership with the ITM. She contributed to the concept and design of the (in-person and online) SOPH short course in Pharmaceutical Policy and Management, of which she is a member of the teaching faculty; and since 2021, she is the coordinator and a member of the teaching faculty of a 3-week short course on “Pharmaceutical policies in health systems”, hosted at the ITM and co-facilitated by SOPH colleagues.

Projects

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