Heidi Mertes is an associate professor in Medical Ethics at Ghent University, where she is a founding member of the Bioethics Institute Ghent and of the Metamedica platform. Her main area of research is the ethics of reproductive medicine in general and more specifically ethical challenges in embryo research, fertility preservation, preimplantation and prenatal genetic testing, social egg freezing, stem cell derived gametes, genetic parenthood, genome editing, etc. She teaches courses in medical ethics, bioethics and moral sciences.
She is the current chair of the Belgian Federal Commission for medical and scientific research on Embryo’s in vitro. She is also a member of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics and of the Ethics Committee of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).