Mylène Deschênes is the Director of ethics and legal affairs at the Fonds de recherche du Quebec – the Quebec (Canada) research funding agency. She advises the Funding agency and the Chief Scientist of the province on ethical and legal issues related to research. She has been leading the development of important policies for publicly funded research. Amongst her portfolio she oversaw the drafting and implementation of the funding agencies’ Open access policy, as well as the policy on research integrity.
She is the Chair of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee and Chair of the Luxembourg research integrity committee (CRI). Throughout the years, she also served on various Institutional research ethics committee.
Prior to working at the Quebec research funding agency, she was the Executive Director of the P3G Consortium, an international, nonprofit organization aimed at facilitating the emergence, harmonization and collaboration between population-based genomics research projects based in more than 40 countries. She also served as Senior Ethics Policy Advisor at the Ethics Office of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, where she worked on ethical, legal and social issues raised by longitudinal studies in large population based cohorts.
She holds a Bacchelor in Common law and one in Civil law (McGill University) as well as Master degree in law (with a focus on Biotechnologies and Society).