Klaus M. Leisinger

[1] Under the leadership of Klaus Leisinger, the Novartis Foundation united and embodied the historical commitment to corporate philanthropy of the Basel chemical industry and earned consultative status with the UN ECOSOC.

He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and was awarded an honorary doctorate in Theology by the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in November 2004.

[4] Until 2012, he served as the Co-Chairman of the Digital Health Initiative – a unique multi-stakeholder collaboration between the ICT and healthcare sectors to implement the Millennium Development Goals.

In November 2014, Leisinger was appointed member of the "Leadership Council" by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (led by Prof. Jeffery Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York).

The focus of his work is to help develop in a stakeholder-oriented approach a code of conduct for responsible research, particularly in the context of clinical trials of pharmaceutical corporations in low- and middle income countries.

In 2016 Klaus Leisinger was invited by the Pontifical Academia Scientiarum to join the core steering group of the initiative Ethics in Action, aimed at promoting integral human and sustainable development, in response to Pope Francis’ encyclical laudato si’.