The Scientific Board
The Scientific Board guarantees the high standards of the scientific expert appraisal process and the independence of ANSES.
Role and tasks
The Scientific Board ensures the consistency of the Agency's scientific work in accordance with the Public Health Code (Articles L. 1313-6, R. 1313-24, R. 1313-25 and R. 1313-27).
It issues opinions on ANSES's research and expert appraisal orientations, work programme and scientific partnership policy, including at the international level.
Regarding ANSES's research activities, it also oversees the research assessment and management process, and assists the General Directorate in developing the procedure for calls for research projects.
With regard to expert appraisal activities, it is consulted on the functioning of expert committees and appointment of their members.
To improve the scientific quality of expert appraisals, the Scientific Board conducts methodological work designed to optimise the health risk assessment process: analysis of the weight of evidence and uncertainties, methods for taking the exposome into account, etc. To do this, it sets up working groups reporting directly to it.
Composition
The Scientific Board guarantees the high standards and independence of the scientific expert appraisal process. It also oversees the evaluation of the Agency's research activities. Entirely independent of ANSES’s operational bodies, the Scientific Board is international in scope and made up exclusively of scientists from research bodies, expert organisations, and peer agencies. Its members possess a wide range of scientific expertise, and are therefore perfectly able to take on all of ANSES’s various areas of intervention.
The Scientific Board has 29 members:
- Two ex-officio members: the Chair of the Scientific Board of the French Health Products Safety Agency (ANSM) and the Chair of the Scientific Board of Santé Publique France
- 24 scientists with expertise in the Agency's sphere of competence, appointed by ministerial order
- Three members acting in an advisory capacity, elected from among the Agency's scientific staff by their peers for a renewable three-year period.>
The Scientific Board meets four times a year.
The Scientific Board members' public declarations of interests are available on theMinistry of Health's website
Scientific Board publications
In the course of fulfilling their duties, the members of the Scientific Board have produced a number of opinions, reports and assessments. Some of these publications may subsequently give rise to an opinion from the Agency, for example, on taking the weight of evidence and uncertainty into account in scientific risk assessments.