Former Treasurer of EPWS, Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINSc), Brussels (Belgium)
After graduating in Biology in 1990 and obtaining her PhD in 1995, Isabelle Schön became a Research Fellow at Leeds University, UK, for one year. After several scholarships for her post-doc research, including a scholar of a Marie-Curie Training grant (1999-2000) at the RBINSc (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels) she became a Research Fellow at the RBINSc in 2001 where she is working as senior researcher since 2009 and as team leader since 2015. She is also the liaison for polar research at the RBINS, the editor-in-chief of the Belgian Journal of Zoology and guest professor for Molecular Ecology at Hasselt University (Belgium).
She was a member of the Co-ordination Committee of the ESF PARTNER network. She participated as a senior scientist in two European networks (Marie-Curie RTN SEXASEX and ESF-EURODIVERSITY project MOLARCH) for which she provided advice for gender equality (e.g. during a special session on Women in Science at the 1st training workshop) and in an Australian Biodiversity Project. She is currently participating in the international research project SPEEDY (2012-2016), the JPIO pilot project on deep sea mining and coordinates the LATTECO pioneer project (2015-2017) being funded by Belgian Science Policy.
Isabelle Schön is founder of BeWiSe, the Belgian Network for Women in Science, was its President and Vice-President, and is still a board member. She organised the annual BeWiSe meetings in 2001, 2002, 2005 & 2006. She was a member of the expert group ‘Towards an European Platform for Women Scientists’ and has participated in various conferences on women in science topics (e. g. EMBL special meeting, EC meeting).