STeP Members

Jeanne Mifsud Bonnici is Professor in European Technology Law and Human Rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. She co-leads the STeP Research Group, which she has also co-founded. She holds two doctorates (LL.D - University of Malta,1995 and PhD - University of Groningen, 2007) as well as a Masters in Cognitive Science (University of Birmingham, 1996). She has published a book on ‘Self-Regulation in Cyberspace’ and has followed discussions on internet governance for over 10 years.

Joe Cannataci co-founded and is Co-director of STeP where he is Full Professor, holding the Chair of European Information Policy & Technology Law and focuses on externally funded collaborative research projects and the supervision of PhD students. He is UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy and also head of the Department of Information Policy & Governance at the University of Malta. A Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and UK Chartered Information Technology Professional (CITP), his law background meets his techie side as a Senior Fellow and Associate Researcher at the CNAM Security-Defense-Intelligence Department in Paris.

Hans Vedder is a Professor of Economic Law, interested in the interaction between technology, economics and economic law across the board. Doing research in the fields of (EU) competition law, EU environmental law, telecommunications law and (renewable) energy law.

Jonida Milaj Weishaar is Assistant Professor in Technology Law and Human Rights. Her main research focus is on the challenges that technology creates for the protection of fundamental rights of individuals. She has a special interest in Open Source Intelligence and AI. Jonida teaches various subjects in the area of Technology Law. She is a research fellow at the Information Society Law Center, Milan University and is a visiting lecturer at the Central University of Political Science and Law, Beijing.

Dr. Nynke Vellinga works as a postdoc researcher at the STeP research group, Department of Transboundary Legal Studies, University of Groningen. After receiving her doctorate in 2020, she continued her research in the field of autonomous mobility and law. Vellinga's research focuses on legal questions surrounding traffic law, liability, insurance, vehicle requirements, and cybersecurity. ORCID

Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie is a lecturer at the University College Groningen and Co-Founder of St. London Story a diaspora led think tank. She pursued her doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, where she wrote her thesis on Climate Migration Governance in Assam. Her current work looks at the regulation of disinformation and hatespeech on social media, where she treats virtual spaces as an extension of social spaces requiring organic evolution of norms of behaviour and citizenship.

Melania Tudorica is a Researcher and member of the STeP Research Group since 2012. Her main research focus is on data protection and technology challenges in the areas of health and electronic evidence in criminal investigations. She will defend her PhD - "Data protection of cross-border health data flows - Mapping health data across borders: Can confidentiality and data protection obligations of health data be preserved across EU borders and beyond?" - in 2021. She has worked on various EU funded FP7/Horizon2020 projects, such as SMART, RESPECT, EVIDENCE and E-CRIME and is currently working on INSPECTr and TREIO. Melania holds an LLM degree in International and European Law from the University of Groningen

Bashar Fteiha is a PhD Researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. His research focuses on the use of Law and Economics Approach in regulating the cyber-security of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Specifically, he is seeking to employ the theory of optimal law enforcement to examine how legal rules can be formulated to provide security-enhancing incentives to all the relevant actors throughout the lifetime of AVs. His project is part of the CyberSecurity Noord Nederland programme (CSNN)

Efstratios (Stratis) Koulierakis is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. He specialises in EU technology law, personal data protection, and human rights. His PhD research is about data protection by design and it is funded by the interdisciplinary project KnowGraphs, part of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Efstratios works on the intersection of law and technology on topics such as legal informatics, the implications of anonymisation techniques, and the legal aspects of knowledge graphs. He has also practiced law as a qualified lawyer, registered in the Athens Bar Association. ORCID

Ida Varošanec works as a PhD candidate with STeP at the Transboundary Legal Studies department of the Faculty of Law, University of Groningen. She conducts research at the intersection of EU public law, intellectual property law and technology law in the context of artificial intelligence where private interests in secrecy impede the public interest in transparency of AI-assisted decisions. Ultimately, her PhD project aims towards the facilitation of co-existence between transparency and IP protection in the upcoming European AI regulatory framework. Beyond her PhD topic, she teaches within the area of technology law. Her research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, and art. ORCID

Jessica Hof works as lecturer and researcher at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen. Since September 2020, she started her external PhD-project in close collaboration with de University of Groningen as part of the Cybersecurity project Northern Netherlands. Her PhD-project is targeting the design process of eHealth applications. The central research question is: ‘In which way can the values of the legislator, purchaser, developer and (end)users be guaranteed in respect of the accessibility and protection of personal data in the design process of eHealth applications?’.

Lauren Elrick is a Lecturer in Technology Law at the University of Groningen, and a PhD Researcher dually enrolled within the University of Groningen and the "Mihai Viteazul" National Intelligence Academy, Romania. Her research is conducted as part of the ESSENTIAL Project ('Evolving Security SciencE through Networked Technologies, Information policy And Law') and focuses on how personal information is used within the EU’s border security ecosystem. In particular, her research focuses on how to balance the maintenance of security with the protection of human rights, and considers whether a holistic approach should be applied when balancing these obligations. ORCID

Marcu Florea is a PhD researcher and his research focuses on consent for processing personal data for biomedical research. He graduated with a Law degree from the University of Bucharest, holds M.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the same university and an LL.M. in International and Comparative Private Law from the University of Groningen. Starting from 2020, Marcu has been working as part of KnowGraphs, an International Training Network funded by the EU Research Framework Program Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions which involves interdisciplinary research in the field of computer science and law. Currently, Marcu is a visiting researcher at George Washington University in the USA. ORCID

Margaret Warthon is a doctoral researcher at the University of Groningen. She graduated as a lawyer from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and obtained her LL.M. degree in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Göttingen. Prior to starting her PhD studies, Margaret did her training at CEIPI and CiTiP at the University of Strasbourg and KU Leuven, respectively. Her research explores the implications of the GDPR on the design of biometric algorithms. Her current research interests focus on data protection; biometrics, XAI; algorithmic surveillance and emotion detection.

Michele Molè works as PhD researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. He is currently developing with STeP a multidisciplinary research project with the aim of rethinking the protection of workers' fundamental rights through cybersecurity and privacy law. Labour law and technology regulation are two increasingly interconnected disciplines that require a coherent legal framework in order to make labour protection effective also in cyberspace. His project is part of the CyberSecurity Noord Nederland programme (CSNN). ORCID

Monique Kalsi is a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on combining the legal requirements of data protection by design and by default under the General Data Protection Regulation with new generation of biometric technologies. Her research is funded under TReSPAsS-ETN (Training in Secure and Privacy-Preserving Biometrics) project. She holds a Master’s degree in Public International Law from the University of Strasbourg (France) and a second Master’s degree in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (France). She has also graduated from the Legal Clinic in Human Rights Program of the Institut international des droits de l’Homme - Fondation Rene Cassin in Strasbourg. Monique currently also works as a co-editor of the NNHRR Blog Human Rights Here. Furthermore, she has for the second year in a row been responsible for coaching the team of the University of Groningen for different French speaking moot court competitions in European human rights law. ORCID

Peter van de Waerdt is an expert on EU competition law, EU data protection, and especially on the relations between these two fields. He has researched how the collection of personal data affects the structure of digital markets; how the GDPR’s general principles are difficult to apply to dominant companies; how excessive data collection strengthens market power and reduces consumer welfare; and more. Peter coordinates and lectures Competition Law in the Digital market, a course based upon this research, and teaches Introduction to Technology Law, Research Seminar, and Research Colloquium. ORCID

Radina (Adi) Stoykova is Assistant Professor in technology law in Groningen University. She holds a dual PhD in law and information security from Groningen University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is specializing in cybersecurity and cybercrime regulation, reliability of digital evidence, digital forensics standardization, as well as the impact of new technology on human rights within the criminal justice system. Adi is a lecturer at the Norwegian Police University College and a member of the Cybercrime and Forensic Computing Research Training Group 2475, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen, Germany. She currently focuses on reliability of AI-generated evidence. ORCID

Assistant Professor of Law at Groningen University. Ph.D. in the program of Individual Person and Legal Protections at the Scuola Superiore Sant`Anna (Italy), LLM in Law and Technology from Tilburg University (Netherlands), LLB in Law from Los Andes University (Colombia). Teaching: Law in Practice (2024), Introduction to Technology Law (2023), Research Seminar (2023-2024), Law of Substantiable technology (2024). Previously taught: commercial law (2019-2022), securities (2019-2022) and law and technology (2020-2022). Experience on gamification, online and blended learning (MOOC fAIr LAC on AI in the public sector and Coursera Ethics on AI). Research: Technology and the way that it affects consumers and the market in general. Project: "The adoption of disruptive technologies (AI) in organizations through the creation and implementation of an ethical-legal toolkit". Member of the EU JulIA Project. Chair of the Technical Committee of UNESCO's AI and the Rule of Law programme. ORCID

Stefan Weishaar is Professor of Law and Economics at Groningen University. He is research affiliate at MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research in Boston (USA) and Adjunct Professor at the School of Law and Economics at China University for Political Science and Law (CUPL) in Beijing. He has been appointed to the United Nations Subcommittee on Environmental Taxation Issues.

Stefan’s has a keen interest in the working of markets and regulatory instruments. His work covers several Law and Economics domains in the areas of Climate & Energy law, Competition law, Procurement law and Market integration. As of late he has an increasing interest in the question how technology and societal challenges force transition processes and which role the law should play.

Sophia Salziger is a PhD candidate researching civil liability for data protection violations. She analyses monetary compensation for non-material damages, such as psychological distress, damage to reputation and infringements of personality rights. Therefore, she is conducting a comparative study of Article 82 GDPR within the Transboundary Legal Studies and Private Law departments. Her project is part of the Cybersecurity Noord Nederland programme.

Natalia Lisowska is a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on the design of energy data spaces in a way which would cater for the rights and needs of collective entities, in particular, energy communities. Currently, she works on the DATA CELLAR project, European Horizon 2020 project, which is developing energy data spaces that will aid with the development and management of energy communities in the European Union. ORCID

Catherine Jasserand (-Breeman) conducted her PhD research on the ‘reprocessing of biometric data for law enforcement purposes’ under the supervision of Prof. Jeanne Misfud Bonnici and Prof. Laurence Gormley at the University of Groningen. After her PhD, she joined CiTiP at KU Leuven (Belgium) as a postdoctoral Marie Curie fellow to pursue her research project on facial recognition technologies in public spaces (DATAFACE). Since February 2024, she is part of STeP as a part-time assistant professor. Her research interests lie at the intersection of AI, biometrics, and fundamental rights. ORCID

Anastasiia Liulina is a PhD candidate since September 2023. Topic: 'Digital open source evidence of international crimes: opportunities, challenges and fair trial'. Education: Public International Law LLM, University of Groningen, International Law and Translation(English) LLB, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Intern at OSINT team in international Partnership for Human Rights (October 2023-February 2024). ORCID

Balázs Markos is a PhD Candidate researching the impact of AI on fundamental rights in the healthcare sector, and developing a potential framework for fundamental rights impact assessments (FRIAs). Analyzing the impact of new legislation (e.g. the AI Act) on the sector. ORCID

Marina Markellou is Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Groningen. After accomplishing a Master of Laws in Intellectual Property (LLM) on September 2005 in Montpellier of France, she was offered a scholarship by the Greek State to pursue a Ph.D. degree in the field of Copyright law (University of Montpellier/University of Athens-high distinction). Her primary research interests concern intellectual property, law and art, protection of cultural heritage. Member of the Ethics and Deontology Committee of NCSR DEMOKRITOS, of the CECOJI-CNRS of France, of the Greek ALAI group and of the International Society for Research on Art and Cultural Heritage Law, she often participates as an ethics evaluator on behalf of European Commission in many HORIZON Europe Projects and as legal and ethics expert in many European programs. ORCID

Anna Helena Marquez is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on clarifying the legislative landscape imposed on data-driven markets by designing a new data-centric lens for understanding the framework regulating the use and disposition of data in data-driven markets. Additionally, her research proposes a new understanding of the framework by perceiving data as a resource, managed through a commons-like arrangement, termed the "Global Digital Commons" (GDC). Her research interests focus on the regulation of data-driven markets and the regulatory burden imposed from different legal fields onto companies competing in digital markets. More specifically, she is interested in the intersections of the fields of data protection, competition law, and data governance. Anna has an LLB in International and European law, and an LLM in European Economic law from Groningen University. During her undergraduate degree, she participated in an ERASMUS exchange program at the University of Würzburg.

Dr. Saleh Al-Sharieh is Associate Professor of Law at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). His research focuses on innovation regulation, intellectual property law, data protection, and comparative law. ORCID

Ruizhe Cheng is a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. Her research centers on algorithmic management and digital platform work, exploring these issues through the lenses of data protection and labor law.
She is currently working on a comparative research project examining these topics within both the EU and Chinese regulatory frameworks. She holds an LLB from China and a Master’s degree in Law from Vanderbilt University in the U.S. Before joining the University of Groningen, she served as an Assistant Judge at a primary people’s court in China for several years.

Anna Helena Marquez Daly is a Master student, who is also a research assistant at STeP. She contributes to several projects by researching several pieces of legislation, as well as doing some literature review for various topics.

Aaron Ceross is finishing the DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, using computational methods of legal analysis, focusing on regulation of privacy and data protection. The work makes use of statistics, natural language processing, and automated reasoning. He is currently also working as a post-doctoral research associate in the Natural Interaction Lab in the Department of Engineering at Oxford.

Carolin Kaiser is Senior Inspector at the Dutch data protection authority, working on international transfers of personal data in general and on financial data in particular. She has completed and defended her PhD research on privacy and identity issues in financial transactions in 2018.

Evgeni Moyakine is an Assistant Professor IT Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen, an Associate Member of the STeP Research Group of the same university and a Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Center of the University of Milan. His research interests include international/European law, IT law, cybersecurity, telecommunications law, privacy and data protection. He has authored and co-authored scientific publications in the above-mentioned fields, has obtained several research grants and has been involved in various national and international research projects. ORCID

Frank Pace serves as Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to Governor Josh Green and Administrator of the Hawai`i Office of Homeland Security. He is charged with leading counter-terrorism efforts, planning and operations, grants management, the Hawai`i State Fusion Center, and statewide interoperable emergency communications. During his tenure, Frank has led the development and implementation of the State Homeland Security and Targeted Violence Prevention Strategies and expanded the operational capabilities of the state fusion center. Additionally, he oversees statewide cybersecurity collaboration and efforts to address emergent threats against Hawai'i's residents and critical infrastructure. Frank also serves as Vice-Chair of the Governors Homeland Security Advisors Council (GHSAC) and is an alumnus of the Naval Post Graduate School, Center for Homeland Defense Studies, Executive Leaders Program.

Mattis van 't Schip works as a PhD Candidate at Radboud University (iHub). His research project, which is part of INTERSCT (intersct.nl), focuses on legal cybersecurity and privacy obligations for "Internet of Things" devices. Before moving to Radboud University, Mattis worked as junior researcher at STeP. ORCID

Shara Monteleone is a legal officer at the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) since 2019. Previously, she worked as a policy analyst for the European Parliamentary Research Center (Brussels), as Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen (NL), as a researcher at INRIA (France), and as a policy analyst at the JRC of the European Commission (IPTS, Seville), taking part in several EU-funded projects and focusing on policies and legislation in the field of privacy and data protection. She holds a PhD in Law and Technology, an LLM on Media and data protection law from the University of Florence (Italy) and an LLM from the European University Institute. She is an Italian qualified lawyer.

Trix Mulder has been a practical professor of Legal Aspects of Entrepreneurship at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen as of May 2023. Her research focusses on legal issues that arise at the intersection of ICT and law, such as questions related to data exchange and privacy, cyber security legislation as well as the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). She achieved her PhD from the University of Groningen in March 2022, specialising in privacy and health data. Furthermore, she worked as a lawyer at the Ministries of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and Health, Welfare and Sport.

Veli Kaplan is a PhD student at the University of Groningen and his research focused on "cost-effectiveness in cyber related law enforcement and intelligence operations". In the ESSENTIAL project, he seeks to identify the properties of cybercrimes, the current legal framework, and their cost impacts on law enforcement. He aims to establish the model for cost-effective law enforcement, including prevention and investigation, as well as intelligence.

Gerard Ritsema van Eck is an assistant professor of technology law at the University of Groningen's IT-law section. He completed his PhD 'Privacy and Participation in Public: Data Protection issues of Crowdsourced Surveillance' in 2021 at the STeP-group. He writes on European privacy and data protection law, as well the developing Union data acquis. ORCID

Mando Rachovitsa is an Associate Professor in Human Rights Law at the School of Law, University of Nottingham. She is also the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Law Centre. Her expertise lies in the area of Human Rights and Technology Law. Her research lies at the intersection between human rights law and technology, including digital human rights, and human rights-based design for cybersecurity standards and algorithmic systems. Mando has written on the human rights assessment of the use of new technologies, including encryption, digital ID systems, and how human rights law may inform the design and implementation of Internet standards. ORCID