Philippe Desmeth

After training in environmental sciences, he was research assistant at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). In 1996, he joined the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM) as international cooperation manager.

In addition to coordinating collaborative research projects, he develops standard procedures and fair cooperation schemes at the Belgian Science Policy Office, which funds and manages the BCCM, to provide a framework for sustainable collaboration with institutions in developed and developing countries.

He has gained expertise in Access and Benefit Sharing in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol. At the Belgian Science Policy, he coordinated EU-funded projects such as MOSAICC. He is involved in innovative approaches to support intellectual property rights related to the use of microbiological resources and ownership concepts applying to biological material. He has co-launched the TRUST project on establishing a system to implement the Nagoya Protocol in microbiology.

For four years he was manager of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform which supports science-based policymaking on biodiversity and is the Belgian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. 

He was President of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) from September 2010 until July 2017.  Today he sits as ex officio member of the WFCC Executive Board.