Speaker profile
Arantxa Ballesteros Riaza
Head of the Process and Product Safety Unit at the ITENE Technology Center.
She is an Environmental Scientist with expertise in pollution, toxicology and environmental health.
Arantxa started her work at ITENE by assessing the safety of new packaging materials, and has more than 8 years of experience in R&D focused on the evaluation of the impacts on human and environmental health of chemical substances (including polymers and biopolymers), nanomaterials, active substances and compounds of natural origin, and emerging pollutants, such as microplastics. Her background is on in vitro and in silico approaches to assess toxicity of materials, leading the technical management of the Toxicology Laboratory at ITENE.
In the recent years, she has specialised in the definition and implementation of Safe- and Sustainable- by Design (SSbD) strategies, participating in and coordinating numerous European projects in this field, and actively contributing to the EC and JRC. She is also an active member of the European NanoSafety Cluster and the European Cluster for the study of the effects of micro- and nanoplastics on human health (CUSP).