Prof Rob Jansen anniversary

It’s now two years since Genea farewelled our founding father, Professor Rob Jansen. On July 11, 2014, after more than 35 years at the forefront of reproductive medicine and genetics, Robert Paul Siebrand Jansen lost a long battle with illness during a final holiday to Europe to indulge his twin passions – sailing and Genea.

Now two years later, Prof Jansen’s visionary and entrepreneurial pursuit of innovation and cutting edge medicine continues to guide Genea’s approach to fertility treatment and our wider aim to advance fertility science.
 
His vision and leadership motivated the team at Genea (originally Sydney IVF) to make breakthrough developments in the culture and incubation of embryos as well as the first true integration of IVF and genetics. And still today, we are committed to keeping up Prof Jansen’s passionate pursuit, to continue to chase the breakthroughs, ideas and inventions which will make a difference scientifically and medically to people across Australia and around the world.
 
Just last week the Genea Fertility and Genea Biomedx team travelled to Helsinki, Finland to attend the 32nd Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, the largest fertility conference in the world. While there they learnt about ways to improve patient outcomes. The team also talked about the world leading fertility instruments and products ideated and created by Genea Biomedx including our world first automated vitrification instrument Gavi and the world class incubator with time-lapse functionality Geri.

Both of these instruments are at work in the Genea labs, together with our embryo culture medium suite, Gems.

All of those innovations and breakthroughs are testament to the culture created by Prof Jansen when he established Genea as Sydney IVF almost 30 years ago in 1985.

Prof Jansen never lost his fascination for the physiology of reproduction and he never exhausted his desire to share what he had learnt nor bored of writing and presenting on the topic.
 
A prolific writer, Prof Jansen authored one book, edited three more and wrote 31 chapters in books edited by others. He was the principal or instigating author in approximately 150 scientific publications and co-author in many, many others. He also authored 25 papers on ethics and reproduction and six or more on the mitochondrial genome.
 
His contributions to the discipline of genetics and reproductive medicine were not limited to the written word. Prof Jansen was a college examiner, Chairman of the college subspecialisation committee and a consultant to the NSW Law Reform Commission. He was the President of the 11th World Congress on IVF and Human Reproductive Genetics in Sydney in 1999, he was on the editorial board of two international journals, he was a referee for 15 journals and he had an extensive involvement with the NHMRC.
 
During his career, Prof Jansen gave over 120 presentations as an invited speaker at international and national meetings on a vast array of subjects and in 2012 he was honoured with membership of the Order of Australia for services to medical research and education.
 
Most importantly to Sydney IVF and Genea, Prof Jansen was our mentor and guiding light and we pay tribute to him everyday by continuing to innovate and improve in the field of fertility science.
 
Disclaimer: Please note that this is a Genea Group blog and as such information may not be relevant for all clinics. We advise that you consult clinics directly for further information.