Vagelis Papakonstantinou

Vagelis Papakonstantinou is Professor of Personal Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). His research focuses on personal data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and the broader regulation of digital technologies.

He is Director of VUB’s Cyber and Data Security Lab (CDSL), as well as a core member of the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) and the Brussels Privacy Hub.

His work also engages with political philosophy and legal theory. He is the author of Archipelago, and the information platform that is the state (Nomos, 2026), an open-access monograph developing a political philosophy of the state through information and its processing.

He is co-editor of General Data Protection Regulation: Article-by-Article Commentary (Nomos, 2023) and sole editor of a forthcoming Edward Elgar article-by-article commentary on Council of Europe Convention 108. He also edits the Nomos book series The Regulation of Digital Technologies.

Since the early 2000s, he has participated in legislative and expert committees concerned with major EU, Council of Europe and Greek data-protection instruments, including Framework Decision 2008/977/JHA, the EU PNR Directive, Convention 108+, the GDPR, the Law Enforcement Directive and Greek Law 4624/2019.

Since 2018, he has built an extensive and unusually sustained portfolio of EU-funded collaborative research, participating through VUB’s CDSL or as an external expert in more than two dozen projects with aggregate consortium budgets exceeding €100 million, alongside further advisory-board appointments. Across these projects, his work has focused on legal compliance, data protection and cybersecurity analysis, and the development of regulatory and policy options for emerging technologies.

He also founded and edits the VUB Regulation of Digital Technologies Research Paper Series. Through CDSL, he is also involved in the sponsorship and editing of SSRN’s Cyberspace Law eJournal.

His previous public and institutional appointments include two terms as a member of the Board of Directors of the Hellenic Copyright Organisation, service as an alternate member of the Hellenic Data Protection Authority from 2016 to 2021, and service as Data Protection Officer of the Greek political party Nea Demokratia from 2021 to 2024.

Alongside his academic work, he practises business and technology law through MPlegal, a specialist firm based in Athens and Brussels, with a particular focus on technology start-ups and mid-sized companies.

Further information on his publications and activities is available on his personal website.