Update from Blanca Serrano – September 2025

Dear members and friends,

As we enter the final third of the year, I want to take a moment to thank you for your continued engagement and support. We began the summer with a renewed Board of Administration: congratulations to our new Chair, Dow’s Nicholas Ball, to our Treasurer, LyondellBasell’s Erik Rushton, and a warm welcome to our two new members, Shell’s Sarah Hughes and ExxonMobil’s Christopher Warren.

Building on the energy and dedication of our outgoing Chair, Chantal Smulder, we look ahead to a busy and rewarding season, with several workshops and events already on the horizon.

We will be present at EUROTOX from 14–17 September, where ECETOC will host a booth and, as every year, proudly sponsor the ECETOC Christa Hennes Award. The following week, on 22 September, we’ll host a webinar on ECETOC’s past and ongoing work in the field of omics (and next steps!) – your can find out more and register here.  A little later, in November, we look forward to the MARII workshop in Madrid, which will bring valuable exchanges across the microplastics research community.

Meanwhile, our scientific work continues at full speed. We are advancing projects on New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), contributing to the evolving debate around Endocrine Disruptors (EDs), and developing frameworks on polymers, among other topics, all with the aim of supporting robust and practical approaches to chemical risk assessment.

Looking ahead, stay tuned for the launch of our new website in the coming months. The ECETOC team has been working to make your experience of finding our publications easier, faster, and organised by topic, so that the science you need is always at your fingertips.

While preparing our new website, we realised that ECETOC has produced more than 500 publications over the years; including articles, technical reports, and monographs. Chances are, we’ve worked on the topic you’re interested in. Do take a look at our repository, it may already hold the insights you need.

We also encourage our collaborators and partners from academia, regulatory bodies and NGOs to consider joining ECETOC as Associate Members. This is a great way to strengthen ties with our community and to help shape future work. You can learn more about the benefits on our Membership page.

The coming months will give us plenty of opportunities to connect and move our shared agenda forward. We are already busy planning our 2026 workshops (trying to find a creative solution to the limited travel budgets our member companies have) and we will soon launch our very own ECETOC secondment programme (do you have a promising young colleague in mind? Let me know!). More on this soon!

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing many of you at EUROTOX, in Madrid, in Brussels or at other upcoming workshops.

Warm regards,

Blanca Serrano