Francis P. Crawley is the Executive Director of the Good Clinical Practice Alliance – Europe (GCPA) in Brussels, Belgium. He is the founder and Director of the Strategic Initiative for Developing Capacity in Ethical Review (SIDCER). He coordinates the GCPA-SIDCER European Fellowship in Research Ethics (EFRE) He is a philosopher specialised in ethical, legal, and regulatory issues in health research, having taught at several European, Asian, and Middle East universities. He is the past Secretary General, Ethics Officer, and Chairman of the Ethics Working Party at the European Forum for Good Clinical Practice.

He currently chairs the methodologies sub-group of the Real Word Data Working Group at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, Royal Colleges of Physicians. He has acted as an author or expert for the leading international and European research ethics and GCP guidelines, as well as for several guidelines in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

He was for 15 years the Chairman of the Ethical Review Committee of the International Network for Cancer Treatment and Research (INCTR); a member of the INCTR Tissues Committee; and a member of the Ethics Committee of the European Organization for Research & Treatment of Cancer; Consultant to the Peking University Institutional Review Board; and a member of the Steering Committee of the Chinese Ethics Committee of Registering Clinical Trials (ChECRCT). He has been a member of the joint EMVI-AMVTN Ethical Review Committee; a Permanent Liaison Officer to the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO; and a Contact Officer for CIOMS. In 2006 he was Visiting Expert in research ethics at the Ministry of Health, eSingapore.

He was the committee chairman of the WHO guidelines on ethics committees and data monitoring committees; and he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP). He also served for four years on the UNAIDS Ethical Review Committee. He is a co-founder and past Steering Committee Member of the Global Forum for Bioethics in Research; a past member of the Committee of Interested Parties of the Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research & Development; a past member of the European Science Foundation’s Education Working Group, and a past member of the WHO GCP Handbook drafting committee. In addition, he is a member of the Ethics Working Group, European Academy of Paediatrics (UEMS-EAP); and an investigator in several European Commission projects, including ‘The Development of European Standards on Confidentiality and Privacy in Healthcare among Vulnerable Patient Populations’, ‘Ethical Function in Hospital Ethics Committees’, & ‘Ethical
Considerations in Clinical Trial Collaboration with Developing Countries’, ‘European Network for Expertise for Rare Paediatric Neurological Disorders (nEUroped)’ and Relating Expectations and Needs to the Participation and Empowerment of Children in Clinical Trials (RESPECT). He is also a member of past Vice-Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals.

He was the Co-facilitator for the Ethics Roundtable at the Africa Centre for Health & Population Studies in South Africa where he taught a modular GCP course and where he was a member of a DSMB for an HIV vertical transmission study. He is also a member of several regional organizations for ethics in research in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He founded the AfroGuide Project: Developing Guidelines for Health Research in Africa, with the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union. He serves on several editorial boards for international journals.