STeP Members

Research team

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 Professor of Economic Law specialising in competition law and the law on the regulation of energy and telecommunications markets. His research focuses on the interaction between technology and economic law, such the creation of smart grids that integrate IT and energy networks and change the position of market actors. The application of the competition rules to 'Big Tech' and the interaction between information technology/digital markets and competition law more generally features prominently in his teaching and research. Hans supervises several PhD students in this field.

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. Jonida defended her PhD thesis at the University of Groningen with a focus on the challenges that law enforcement surveillance of individuals with every day technology creates for the protection of the right to privacy. Jonida teaches various subjects in the area of Technology Law and is a visiting lecturer at the Central University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.

Mando Rachovitsa is Assistant Professor and works in the area of international technology law. She investigates the role of international (human rights) law in the design and implementation of new technologies and the institutional design of Internet global governance bodies. Currently, she works on the project “Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance” funded by the Dutch Research Council investigating the role of public values in the design of cybersecurity policy norms and standards for IoT.

Nynke Vellinga is a postdoc researcher involved in the Cybersecurity Noord Nederland project, for which she explores the legal framework for cybersecurity in automated vehicles. In addition, Nynke participates in the ITU Focus Group on AI for autonomous and assisted driving.

Carola Onderdelinden studied Criminology at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Before that she was a police officer in the Dutch Police Force. She is a member of  STeP, the ‘Security, Technology and e-Privacy Research Group. After participating in CITYCoP, Carola is currently involved in ARMOUR and TREIO, all projects of the STeP team.

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 Koulierakis is doing PhD research on data protection law. He examines the obligation of compliance by design and by default, according to the General Data Protection Regulation (article 25 GDPR). His research focuses on knowledge graph applications. Specifically, knowledge graphs are a method of knowledge representation, with multiple applications in the domain of information technology. His research is part of the research project KnowGraphs. KnowGraphs examines knowledge graph applications, through a multi-disciplinary approach.

Gerard Ritsema van Eck work focuses on participatory surveillance, privacy, and data protection issues in public spaces. His research is highly transdiscplinary, crossing over between the legal and surveillance studies.

Ida Varosanec is a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen. She is seeking for ways to reconcile opposing public and private interests in the context of artificial intelligence. Specifically, she is working on the facilitation of co-existence between transparency and intellectual property rights in the upcoming European regulatory framework for AI.

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?’.

Karen Mohan is a PhD researcher

Lauren Elrick is a PhD researcher at the University of Groningen and the “Mihai Viteazul” National Intelligence Academy. 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 border security, in particular considering how the dual aims of protecting privacy and security can both be achieved. Primarily, she assesses whether this can be attained through the use of a holistic approach based upon the concept of the ecosystem.

Marcu Florea is currently working as a PhD researcher on the topic of informed consent in personal-health-related knowledge graph. His research is part of KnowGraphs, a project funded under the EU Research Framework Program Horizon 2020 / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, which aims to scale knowledge graphs, making them accessible to a wide audience of companies of all sizes.

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.

Merve Bas Sayyar is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is involved in the ESSENTIAL Project. Her PhD research lies at the intersection of privacy, digital forensics, and big data. Main objective of her PhD is to promote the discussion on how to detect and limit privacy exposures during large-scale digital investigations. She is currently working at the Netherlands Forensics Institute as a trainee.

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).

Monique Kalsi is a PhD researcher focusing on the application of data protection by design and by default obligations resulting under article 25 of the General Data Protection Regulation to biometric technologies. Her research also analyzes if the legal requirements of the data protection by design and by default approach can influence the development of new generation of biometric technologies and improve their acceptability in society. Her Ph.D. is a part of the TReSPAsS-ETN (Training in Secure and Privacy-Preserving Biometrics) project.

Peter van de Waerdt is a PhD researcher focussing on the relations between data protection law and competition law. He examines how personal data collection is often the cornerstone of online market power, and how online market power affects privacy protection in turn. In order to effectively respond to data ecosystems' market dominance and privacy concerns, data protection and competition oversight must be seen as a coherent whole.

Radina Stoykova is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research is related to novel application of fair-trial safeguards in digital investigations. She is focusing on reliability assurance in the design of digital forensics tools, methods, and processes and procedural accuracy standards in the use of technology for law enforcement purposes.

Student Assistant

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.

Associates

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.

Catherine Jasserand (-Breeman) defended her PhD on the ‘reprocessing of biometric data for law enforcement purposes’, research project that she carried out at STeP, under the supervision of Prof. Jeanne Mifsud Bonnici. She also worked on the EU-FP7 project ‘INGRESS’ (development of new generations of fingerprint sensors). She received a Marie Curie individual grant to pursue her own research on facial recognition at KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Els Kindt. She joined KU Leuven in September 2020.

Evgeni Moyakine is an Assistant Professor at the Section IT Law and a member of the STeP Research Group, Evgeni has been dealing with various issues in the field of inter alia IT law, privacy and data protection, has been extensively involved in a wide spectrum of teaching and supervision activities and has been participating in different research projects. He is a member of several committees, including the Research Ethics Review Committee (CETOR) and the Expertise Group Information Technology (EI).

Frank Pace is a EU Law Enforcement Specialist. He currently holds a position with the University of Hawaii, Office of the Vice President for Community Colleges, where he advises administration officials and ensures compliance of United States Civil Rights protections afforded under Title IX. Frank also remains connected to the international law enforcement community, as a member of the INTERPOL Digital Forensics Expert Working Group and advisor to law enforcement officials in the United and the European Union.

Mattis van 't Schip is a Privacy Consultant at Capgemini NL, where he advices his clients on privacy, data protection (GDPR, ePrivacy), and cybersecurity policies for their organization.

Saleh Al-Sharieh (LLB; MA; LLM in Law & Tech; LLD) is an Assistant Professor of Private Law at the UAEU College of Law. His research focuses on innovation regulation, intellectual property law, data protection, and comparative law.

Shara Monteleone is a Policy analist at European Parliament, and collaborates as a member of advisory/ethics boards for STeP projects.

Trix Mulder is a PhD

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.