Dr. Claudia Paoletti

Claudia Paoletti did her Master in Biological Science at the University of Rome (Italy) and her Ph.D. in Plant Genetics at the University of Connecticut, USA. She was for three years at Dalhousie University (Canada) studying plant population genetics and biometry. She continued her activity at the Research Institute for Industrial Crops (Bologna, Italy) where she focused on the evaluation of risks associated to transgenic crops. She worked for 5 years at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission as sampling expert and in January 2006 she joined the GMO Unit of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) first as Team Leader and then as Deputy Head of the Unit. In 2019 she was appointed manager of the program designed to reorganize the EFSA in preparation of the new European law on food safety (entered into force in 2021). Since 2022 she manages the Innovation of Risk Assessment Methodologies programme of EFSA.

She has been the Italian expert for the definition of the European Commission sampling plans for GMO detection in conventional seeds. She coordinated the European sampling research projects KeLDA and she has been the biometric officer of the EU Community Reference Laboratory for GMOs. She is expert consultant for ISO/IWA committees, OECD, CEN, the European Commission and FAO. She organised international training courses on food/feed safety for the European Commission, UNIDO, PHARE project and universities within and outside Europe. She has over 95 contributions either as book chapters, or as peer-reviewed papers. Member of Accademia dei Georgofili since 2019 and Vice-President of the International Pierre Gy Sampling Association (IPGSA) since 2022.