Vagelis Papakonstantinou teaches the European Law and the Digital Transformation course in the LLM in International and European Law at the Brussels School of Governance. Furthermore, he is a Professor on Personal Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law & Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), focusing also on Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property, and the broader topic of technology regulation. He is the scientific coordinator of VUB’s Cyber and Data Security Lab (CDSL), a core member of VUB’s Research Group on Law Science Technology & Society (LSTS), as well as, the Programme Coordinator of the Summer Academy for Global Privacy Law, and a core team member, of the Brussels Privacy Hub.
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 60m Euros. 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).
In addition to the above, through MPlegal, a niche technology law firm in Athens and Brussels, Vagelis Papakonstantinou practices business law with a particular emphasis on technology start-ups and mid-size companies. To match these interests, he also teaches “Entrepreneurship” at the Executive MBA Programme of the University of the Aegean. For the period 2016-2021 he has been a member (alternate) of the Hellenic Data Protection Authority. Since 2021 he is the DPO of the governing (centre-right) political party in Greece. In the past, he has 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