Maria do Céu Patrão Neves is a Professor of Ethics, President of the National Ethics Council for Life Sciences, Vice-President of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies and an expert in Ethics at the European Commission, belongs to the Global Ethics Observatory (GEObs), from UNESCO. With an academic background in Bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics/Georgetown University, Washington DC, where she was also a Visiting Scholar, she has held several positions in organizations such as: consultant to the President of the Republic for the Ethics of Life, member of the National Ethics Council for Life Sciences and the Board of Directors of the International Association of Bioethics. She is an ethics advisor for the European Research Project (H2020) GA869171 B-WaterSmart-Accelerating Water Smartness in Coastal Europe and also for the World Health Organization Project Responsibility for Public Health in the Lusophone World. She integrates several academic-scientific bodies such as: the Institute of Evidence-Based Health (ISBE); the Center for Toxicogenomics and Human Health (ToxOmics); the Law and Artificial Intelligence Group, of the Católica Research Center for the Future of Law; the World Emergency COVID19 Pandemic Ethics; the Ethics Committee of the Lisbon Academic Medicine Center (CAML); the Ethics Committee and also the Entity for Verification of the Admissibility of the Harvest for Transplants (EVA), from the Divino Espírito Santo Hospital, as vice-president; the Ethics Committee of the Order of Nutritionists. She is Faculty Member of the American University of Sovereign Nations / AUSN (USA). She is a member of the scientific / editorial boards of foreign academic-scientific journals and is a “peer reviewer” of several international journals.

Author/coordinator of 36 books, including the 12-volume collection dedicated to Applied Ethics (2016-2018), and the Dictionary of Global Bioethics, with Henk ten Have (2021) and around 200 articles, having produced more than 400 conferences. In the last five years it has organized around 15 international academic-scientific meetings.

She recently led (2017-2019) the project “Ethics, Science and Society: Challenges for BioPolitics”, for reflection and ethical debate on the main social challenges posed by scientific and technological progress; currently leads (2019-2021) the project “Biomedical Ethics and Regulatory Capacity Building Partnership for Portuguese Speaking African Countries (BERC-Luso)”, for ethical and regulatory training applied to biomedical research (and clinical trials), which integrates INFARMED, the Ordem dos Farmacêuticos, the Clinical Research Ethics Committee (CEIC), and the Chair of Bioethics (UNESCO), funded by the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG).

She is a columnist for several regional and national periodicals.

She was a member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 1014.

Distinguished with the Commendation of the Order of Infante D. Henrique, awarded by the President of the Republic.