Vagelis Papakonstantinou

Vagelis Papakonstantinou is a Professor on Personal Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), focusing also on Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property, and the broader topic of technology regulation. He is the director of VUB's Cyber and Data Security Lab (CDSL), as well as, a core member of VUB’s Research Group on Law Science Technology & Society (LSTS) and the Brussels Privacy Hub.

Since the early 2000s Vagelis Papakonstantinou has participated in the law-making committees for the release of all major EU, Council of Europe and Greek laws and regulations on personal data protection (the Council Framework Decision 2008/977/JHA, the EU PNR Directive, Convention 108+, the GDPR, the Police and Criminal Justice Data Protection Directive, Greek law n.4624/2019).

Since 2018, when the GDPR became applicable, he has participated either as a partner through VUB’s CDSL or as an external expert in EU-funded research projects of a total worth of more than 100m Euros.

In addition to the above, through MPlegal, a niche technology law firm, Vagelis Papakonstantinou practices business law with a particular emphasis on technology start-ups and mid-size companies.

For the period 2016-2021 he has been a member (alternate) of the Hellenic Data Protection Authority. For the period 2021-2024 he has been the Data Protection Officer (DPO) of Greece's centre-right (governing) political party Nea Demokratia - ND. Before these, he had been a member of the Board of Directors of the Hellenic Copyright Organisation (for two terms).

His personal website may be found at https://vpapakonstantinou.com