Recent fellows

In 2008 the Faculty of Law included Rosalind Franklin Fellowships into the faculty's personnel policy. In 2009 the first Rosalind Franklin Fellow was appointed.

Prof. Dr Olha Cherednychenko

Prof. Dr Olha Cherednychenko holds the Chair in European Private Law and Comparative Law at the University of Groningen. She is also Founder and Director of the Groningen Centre for European Financial Services Law (GCEFSL). After receiving a Master of Laws in International and European Law (magna cum laude) from Utrecht University in 2002, she joined the Molengraaff Institute for Private Law at this university as Lecturer/Ph D Researcher (2002-2006). She obtained her doctor’s degree in 2007, with a thesis Fundamental Rights, Contract Law and the Protection of the Weaker Party: A Comparative Analysis of the Constitutionalisation of Contract Law, with Emphasis on Risky Financial Transactions (Munich: Sellier European Law Publishers, 2007). She then worked as Senior Lecturer in Private Law at the VU University of Amsterdam where she received a three-year research grant for talented researchers (2006-2011).

In 2012 she was appointed as Associate Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. She has also held visiting fellowships / appointments at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). As a senior researcher, she has been involved in several European research projects, most recently for the European Parliament. She is also a member of several centres of expertise and regularly serves as a member of commissions of trust, in particular within the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The research of Olha Cherednychenko focuses on the interaction between European economic law, European private law and national legal orders.

Prof. Dr Caroline Fournet

Prof. Dr Jeanne Mifsud Bonnici

Prof. Dr Jeanne Pia Mifsud Bonnici was born in Malta where she received her first law degrees and practiced law. She read for a Masters in Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom and read for a PhD at the University of Groningen researching the role of self-regulation in cyberspace. Following a period of teaching and research in the United Kingdom and at the University of Amsterdam, she was appointed as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Department of European and Economic Law. She holds the Chair for European Technology Law and Human Rights.  

Her research focuses on the intersection of European Technology Law and fundamental human rights, in particular, the rights to privacy and security. She now co-leads, the Security, Technology and e-Privacy Research Group which she also co-founded since coming to Groningen. Together with the STeP Research Group she is currently involved in several European Union funded FP7 and H2020 projects such as INGRESS and SIIP examining legal issues surrounding the use of different biometric information by law enforcement agencies; CITYCoP building a privacy-friendly app for citizens to communicate with the police; CARISMAND understanding the role of culture in the management of hazards; E-CRIME researching the economic implications of cybercrime and MAPPING focusing on Internet governance, privacy and intellectual property rights online. She also leads a Marie Skłodowska-Curie joint-doctorate programme, ESSENTIAL, wherein 15 early stage researchers will be carrying out their PhD research in security science.

Prof. mr. Dr Sofia Ranchordás

Prof. mr. Dr Sofia Ranchordás holds an LLB and LLM (summa cum laude) from the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa (Portugal), an LLM in Law Economics (cum laude) from Utrecht University, and a PhD (cum laude) from Tilburg University and University of Antwerp. After her PhD she was a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University Law School (2014) and a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (2015-2016). She has been the recipient of both national and international grants and awards (e.g., Niels Stensen Fellowship, Knight Foundation, NWO Smart Governance). She held previous teaching positions at Tilburg University and Leiden University. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences.

She is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Law & Method and the co-founder of the European Law & Tech Network.