I am a psychiatrist and ethicist interested in how ethics and philosophy can improve mental health care. After completing my medical and psychiatry training at KU Leuven University in Belgium, I earned a PhD in medical ethics and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the U.S. NIH, after which I held a grant from Belgium’s public research council (FWO). More recently, I was a joint faculty fellow at the E&L Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. I am currently working as a psychiatrist at Saint-Pierre University Hospital in Brussels. 

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As a psychiatrist from Belgium, I experienced the particularly complex ethical challenge of facing patients who request and receive psychiatric euthanasia, a practice permitted in a few and increasing number of countries. I decided to pursue rigorous empirical and philosophical 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.

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My research has examined actual cases and established evidence for the profound moral and policy questions the practice raises, including its striking gender gap. ​​My work was published in journals such as the British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, the American Journal of Bioethics, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. I have provided expert testimony to the Canadian Parliament on the country's medical assistance in dying law and have engaged in public writing through outlets like Psyche (Aeon). I am at work on a book provisionally titled "Psychiatric euthanasia's challenge for modern society".​