Amelie Ott, Environmental Sciences Manager
Amelie received a degree in Biotechnology and PhD in Environmental Engineering from Newcastle University (UK). Her PhD focussed on improving water quality monitoring and modelling in Southeast Asia, developing novel approaches to statistics and molecular biology. Amelie enjoys working at the interface of research, industry, and regulatory bodies, translating science into policy. She has experience in managing and leading international multi-stakeholder research projects on environmental chemical safety assessments. In the past, Amelie led a multi-laboratory study (ring test) to validate a new marine biodegradation screening test for persistence assessment (MaP test) as part of a European Chemical Industry Council Long-Range Research Initiative (Cefic LRI) project. This MaP test has since been accepted by OSPAR and is currently under review to become a standardised test method with the OECD. Since then, Amelie has managed an European Centre for Ecotoxicology and Toxicology of Chemicals (ECETOC) task force with experts from industry, regulatory bodies, and academia on advancing regulatory chemical persistence assessment. Prior Cosmetics Europe, Amelie worked as a parliamentary researcher for the UK Parliament, providing independent analysis of public policy issues. Amelie joined Cosmetics Europe in January 2021.
Arianna Giusti, Scientific Manager
Arianna started her academic career in Medical Biotechnology at the University of Florence (Italy) and continued her education at the University of Pavia (Italy) where she graduated with Honours in Molecular Biology and Genetics. Later she moved to Belgium where she obtained the PhD degree in Biomedical Science at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. During her PhD, which was part of the ITN Marie-Curie scholarship “MarPipe”, she worked with zebrafish-platforms with the goal of creating new procedures to assess the safety of drug candidates. She applied her knowledge about ADME/Tox to confirm the suitability of zebrafish models in the drug discovery pipeline. This was achieved both by in-depth investigations of pharmacokinetics parameters in several mammalian species and comparison based on allometric scaling procedures and via studies with ex-vivo metabolism of test compounds. All her activities were in collaboration with both the other partners of the ITN scholarship and companies external from the academic environment. Following her PhD, she worked for a few months as Research Associate before to join Cosmetics Europe in January 2021.
Sabrina Dourte, Project Management assistant
Sabrina joined the Cosmetics Europe Research and Science team in October 2011.
Rob Taalman, Science and Research Director (Retired)
Rob received a degree in Cell biology and a PhD in Human Genetics and Pediatrics from the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) in 1987. Prior to Cosmetics Europe, Rob worked for Litton Bionetics (US), Hazleton Biotechnologies (UK & NL) and the Dutch National Health & Environment Institute (RIVM).
In 1992 he joined Shell International in the Hague as a toxicologist and HSE advisor, moved to Shell Chemicals in London.In 1997 he was seconded to the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) where he was responsible for all Research & Science activities undertaking jointly by the European Chemical Industry. In May 2003 he returned to Shell Chemicals to take up the position of corporate HSE manager. In 2005, he relocated to Shell International in the Hague as the Group’s senior Environmental Health manager. Rob joined Cosmetics Europe in January 2010.
