Mathias Vermeulen

Dr. Mathias Vermeulen is the Public Policy Director at AWO, a new data rights agency that provides legal, consultancy and public policy services to organizations and individuals to help them to navigate the complex new policy areas posed by emerging technologies. 

 

Mathias previously worked as a strategic advisor for the Mozilla Foundation and Luminate, where he advised both organisations on their campaigning and public policy strategies related to countering online disinformation, ad tech and online content regulation.

Prior to that, he worked for five years in the European Parliament on a wide range of digital policy issues, including the EU’s copyright reform, online content regulation, the EU cybersecurity Act, digital trade chapters of trade agreements, and the recast of the EU’s export control regime of dual use items.

Mathias was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Law, Science, Technology and Society at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the European University Institute in Florence, where he managed and participated in a number of large European research projects that focused on the legal and ethical challenges of the use of new technologies.

Mathias has more than a decade experience working more broadly at the intersection of human rights and security policies. He worked as the main advisor to the UN special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, Prof. Dr. Martin Scheinin for three years, and started his professional career with internships at the Special Procedures Unit of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. He also worked as a consultant for a number of organisations, including the Belgian Standing Intelligence Oversight Committee, the European Parliament, and a variety of think tanks and NGOs.

He holds a Ph.D. in European privacy and data protection law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and has a joint European Masters in Human Rights and Democratization from the European Inter-University Centre in Italy and the University of Hamburg.