The Programme
The Brussels Laboratory for Data Protection & Privacy Impact Assessments (d.pia.lab) established the Visiting Scholars Programme in January 2018. Within this scheme, the Laboratory invites academics, researchers, practitioners and activists from multiple disciplines to spend time in Brussels, to participate in the academic life therein and to conduct research about impact assessments in the areas of innovation and technology development. Visiting Scholars will be based at the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology, Society (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), of which the Laboratory constitutes a part of and builds upon its experience and expertise.
- Visiting Scholars Programme Memo (January 2018) [PDF 113 kb].
Visiting Scholars
Alexandra Aslanidou holds a Bachelor in Law (LLB) from the faculty of Law, Economics and Political Sciences of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (2009). Her previous work experience includes practicing law in law offices in Greece, handling civil and criminal law cases. She participated in seminars focused on data protection, e-commerce and legal technology. Her main research interests include privacy, data protection, intellectual property rights, European law (February – August 2018).
Anna Johnston is one of Australia’s most respected experts in privacy law and practice. After serving as Deputy Privacy Commissioner for NSW, Anna founded Salinger Privacy in 2004 to offer specialist privacy consulting services. Salinger Privacy provides advice on managing privacy risks to clients including tech start-ups, established businesses and government agencies. Salinger Privacy also offers a suite of privacy compliance tools including template policies and procedures, checklists, and eBooks including Demystifying De-identification and the Privacy Officer’s Handbook. Anna holds a first class honours degree in Law and was admitted as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW in 1996, but no longer practices as a solicitor (June – July 2018).
The research project of Claudia Quelle concerns the risk-based approach in the General Data Protection Regulation. She is particularly interested in the relation between the risk-based approach and the objective of the GDPR to protect the fundamental rights of natural persons. Her research topics include the risk-based approach under the GDPR, the relationship between risk management and what it means to have rights, the “subjectivity” or value-ladenness of decisions about risk, and the role of individual control in data protection and privacy (May – June 2018).
Elisa Spiller is a PhD candidate in constitutional law at the University of Padova. Her research mainly focuses on multilevel fundamental rights protection and, in particular, she investigates the constitutional issues related to privacy and data protection at national and European levels. At the University of Padova, she further participates to the project “The Law of Big Data”. As a visiting scholar at the d.pia.lab, she studied impact assessment and the precautionary principle in data protection law. She also gave a doctoral seminar at the Brussels Privacy Hub, titled “Data protection and risks to rights. Some insights from the constitutional law perspective” (March – April 2019).
d.pia.lab 