Rosamunde van Brakel

Dr. Rosamunde Van Brakel is a criminologist who works as an Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Law, Science, Technology and Society Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She teaches and coordinates the course Legal, Ethical and Social Issues of Artificial Intelligence and coordinates the VUB Research Chair in Surveillance Studies. Previously she has been managing director of the annual Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference from 2013-2021. She has been studying the social, ethical and legal consequences of (algorithmic) surveillance technologies in the public sector since 2006.  In April 2018 she successfully defended her PhD Taming the Future? A Rhizomatic Analysis of the Unintended Consequences of Pre-emptive Surveillance of Children under supervision of Prof. Dr. Paul De Hert and Prof. Dr. Kristel Beyens. Since finishing her PhD she has been conducting research on the democratic governance of surveillance, crime control, risk profiling and AI. She has been involved as an expert for the Belgian government in 2020 (Expert working group Coronalert app) and was an expert witness for the UK House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry on new technologies and law enforcement in 2021. 

She studied educational sciences and criminology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the University of Ottawa. Previous experiences include working as a policy assistant for the Representative of the Flemish Government in the UK and as a researcher for the Belgian Ministry of Justice. In the past at the VUB she has conducted research on freedom infringements of transport security technologies and evaluation and certification schemes for security products in the context of the EU FP7 projects SIAM and CRISP. From 2014-2015 she was seconded to work as a research fellow for the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy on the project: Big Data, Privacy and Security.