The team

My name is Balazs Bodo, and I am the PI of this project. I’m a research scientist at the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam.  I am a 2 time Fulbright Scholar (2006-7, Stanford University; 2012 Harvard University), and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow (2013-15). I have a strong interdisciplinary background, Having a degree in Economics (MSc, Corvinus University, 1999), and a PhD in Media Studies (ELTE, 2011). In recent years I have worked on copyright piracy, and algorithmic information personalization.

Find me on the IViR website, on UvA, on Twitter, on ORCID, on SSRN, and on my personal webpage.

João Pedro studied Law at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has an LL.M. in Intellectual Property and Competition Law at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center in Germany (Ohem Prize recipient) and a PhD in law from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the IViR, where he focuses on information law matters, including intellectual property and the application of copyright in the online environment, as well as Blockchain law and policy. He is a member of the Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab, and Managing Editor of the Kluwer Copyright Blog.  His publications are available on his IViR page or on his SSRN author page. You can also find him on Twitter @jpquintais.

I am Valeria Ferrari, PhD candidate at the IViR, UvA. In 2017 I obtained a Law degree from the University of Trento. My thesis on Internet Service Providers’ criminal liability is based on my research experience at eCrime – ICT, Law and Criminology, research institute of the University of Trento (2016-2017). At the University of Bologna (2017-2018) I focused on digital evidence and protection of fundamental rights in the context of digital forensic investigations. Within the Blockchain&Society Policy Research Lab I will analyse enforcement-related issues of blockchain-based applications. Beside my academic activities, I am founder and content manager of BlockchainTalks, a monthly conference located in Amsterdam aimed at spreading awareness on the impact of blockchain technologies.

Alexandra Giannopoulou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Blockchain and Society Policy Lab at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. She is an associate researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC) in Paris, within the research group Information and Commons Governance and she has also worked as a research fellow at Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin. Alexandra Giannopoulou is a graduate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and of the University of Paris West Nanterre La Defense. She holds a PhD from the Center for Legal and Economic Studies of Multimedia (CEJEM) at the University of Paris II Pantheon-Assas, which was presented on December 2016. Her PhD thesis entitled “The Creative Commons licenses” and supervised by Professor Jérôme Huet evaluates the legal status of the Creative Commons licenses on an international, European and national scale and assesses the effects of Creative Commons (as a transnational copyright management system) to reforms of the current normative framework. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at Stanford Law School supervised by Professor Paul Goldstein (2012) and a junior lecturer (ATER) at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense (2014-2016).


Heleen Janssen is researcher within the Blockchain Society & Policy Research Team. She has a background and strong interest in law, technology & society. Her research focus will revolve around the governance of emerging data intermediaries that seek to empower individuals, communities, or perhaps SMEs, by offering them (tech & legal) data governance models. These may envisage an alternative to the (often) opaque business models, which entail systemic asymmetries of information and power. Heleen will focus on the role and influence of regulators in responding to questions and issues about power and control, which potentially arise from within and around the data governance models in these emerging tech/legal data intermediaries.

Besides her role in the Blockchain Society & Policy group @ IViR, Heleen is also associate researcher and affiliate lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Lab) of the University of Cambridge, UK. She is in the Compliant and Accountable Systems research group http://www.compacctsys.net. Heleen is also a member of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, http://www.mccrc.org).

From 2019 – 2020, Heleen worked as coordinating legal specialist in the team “Emerging technologies, Public values and Fundamental rights” at the Department of Digital Government, at the Ministry of the Interior. Among her responsibilities were her active participation on behalf of the Dutch government in the Comité ad Hoc on Artificial Intelligence (CAHAI, Council of Europe). She also prepared the government’s response to EU’s White Paper on Artificial Intelligence.

From 2004 – 2018 Heleen was (senior) legal adviser at the Department of Constitutional Affairs & Legislation. Among key responsibilities were lead authorship of the modernisation of the constitutional right to communication secrecy, or the initiation of the project “fundamental rights and algorithms”, which resulted in a more strategic positioning of the Minister of the Interior on this topic. On behalf of the Dutch government, she led negotiations with regard to the modernisation of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (Council of Europe, 2012-2016).

Before working for the government, Heleen wrote her PhD about constitutional interpretation (University of Maastricht, 1997 – 2002). She was a visiting PhD candidate at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, US (2000). Earlier, she received a grant from the German Bundestag to study German law (1995 – 1996, University of Tübingen; High Court in Düsseldorf; European Law Academy, Trier).

Tom Barbereau is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg with a background in Politics, Philosophy, & Economics (PPE) and the Sociology of Technologies. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the IViR. Tom studies Web 3.0 topics including Decentralized Finance, Non-fungible Tokens, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Beyond these, he researches at the intersection of governance and other distributed technologies, not least Federated Learning and Self-Sovereign Identity. 

Find his latest work on GoogleScholar or connect on Twitter.