I am a psychiatrist and ethicist currently working at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) Saint-Pierre, a public university hospital in Brussels. I pursued my medical training and psychiatry residency at KU Leuven University and earned a PhD in medical ethics. I also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, and then a postdoctoral research fellowship from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Belgium’s public research council. More recently, I was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

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As a psychiatrist from Belgium, I experienced the particularly complex ethical challenge of psychiatric euthanasia, i.e., voluntary euthanasia for a mental illness, a controversial practice permitted in a few and an increasing number of countries. I decided to pursue research on this issue, not because I advocate for the practice but because it poses foundational questions for psychiatry and, indeed, our society and humanity at large.

Some key findings include the disproportionate number of women and its significance, the problems with the conceptualization and application of the 'irremediability' requirement in mental disorders, evidence of the phenomenon of countertransference in psychiatric euthanasia evaluations, and the tension with suicide prevention. ​

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My work has been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Ethics, among others. I was invited to testify before the Canadian Parliament on Canada's medical assistance in dying law and served as an ethics advisor to governmental and non-profit organizations, including the US DARPA through RAND on a suicide prevention project. I also serve on the editorial board of the BrJPsych Open and have written for outlets such as Psyche (Aeon). I am currently working on a book on psychiatric euthanasia, drawing on my research, court cases, and memoirs to examine this practice and its unprecedented challenge to modern society.

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