Hidden Innovators – The Untold Stories That Shaped Chemical Safety

For the first ever Nexus Week, ECETOC delegates and workshop participants are invited to a special keynote lecture by Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik. Here's a short teaser for what to expect:

"The history of toxicology is not the history you were taught.
Not because it was falsified. Because it was filtered. Discoveries that shaped your field passed through institutions, funding bodies, peer review panels, and editorial boards before they reached the literature. Most made it through intact. Some did not.
This session investigates what happened to the ones that did not, and what conditions made that outcome possible.
Using real historical cases from toxicology and chemical safety, you will reconstruct how certain findings advanced the science while others stalled, disappeared, or were attributed elsewhere. You will work with primary evidence, propose interpretations, and reach conclusions as a group.
The methodology is the one you already use. Start with the data. Follow it where it goes. Accept the result.
For scientists who have spent careers evaluating evidence rigorously, the process will feel familiar. For the executives in the room, the question is more immediate: if your field's knowledge system has a filtering problem, what has it cost your organisation in missed discoveries, duplicated research, and decisions made on an incomplete picture."

About the speaker, Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik:

Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik trained as a physical & analytical chemist at Sorbonne University (Paris, France), because she wanted to understand how systems work at a molecular level. Twenty years later, she applies the same logic to organisations: find what the system is actually doing, measure the cost, change the conditions.
That work made her a CSR strategist. Not because she abandoned the science, but because the data kept pointing in the same direction. Environmental performance, social equity, and economic efficiency are not competing priorities. They are the same problem, managed separately at significant cost.
As CEO of Trianon Scientific Communication, she has run 180+ implementations across pharmaceutical, energy, textile, agro-food, cosmetics, and materials sectors. Her clients are not early in their careers. They are experienced scientists, executives, and board-level leaders who have built their organisations on rigorous evidence. Her sessions are designed to make them question conclusions they stopped questioning years ago, using the same methodology they already trust start with the data, follow it where it goes, accept the result.
Her work is peer-reviewed: Ngomsik, A-F. and Vermeersch, L. (2024). "Beyond the Financial Balance Sheet: Embracing the Triple Bottom Line for Sustainable Business Success." International Journal of Business Administration, Vol. 15, No. 4.
Board member, European Policy Centre. VP, Brussels Capital Region Climate Committee. Three-time Acquisition International CSR Award recipient (2024, 2025, 2026). Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award finalist (2025). TEDx speaker.