Our experts

Cosimo Monda

Cosimo Monda is the Director of the Maastricht European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity (ECPC), which has been established in 2016 at the Law Faculty, Maastricht University.

At ECPC his work has a strong European and international outlook in the field of privacy and cybersecurity, steering an interdisciplinary group of researchers, academics and professionals active in areas of fundamental rights, data privacy, transparency and confidentiality, IT, data security, and more. Cosimo Monda has a longstanding experience in designing executive education, certification courses and online learning modules for professionals who are required to deal with new regulations and on-going developments in the privacy and cybersecurity market. Before joining Maastricht University, he was working at the European Institute of Public Administration, as Senior Lecturer and Head of Information, Publications, and Marketing services. He holds a Law Degree obtained at the University of Bologna.

His fields of expertise include Data Protection and Cyber security, EU Information Management; Transparency and access to documents; EU Agencies; EU decision-making procedures and Institutions and EU law. 

Sarah Schoenmaekers 

Sarah Schoenmaekers is professor of European Economic Law at Maastricht University  and professor of construction law at Hasselt University.  At Maastricht University she is the director of studies of the master programmes of the faculty of law.

Sarah Schoenmaekers is specialized in European economic law. In her research she focuses particularly on European public procurement law, free movement law and the link between EU economic law and culture. Furthermore, Sarah is interested in European competition law.

 Sarah regularly speaks at international conferences. She spoke at a public hearing of the European Parliament on the new Diploma Directive and was invited to speak about public procurement law at the World Bank in Washington and at George Washington University. 

Paolo Balboni

Paolo Balboni (PhD) is a Professor of Privacy, Cybersecurity, and IT Contract Law at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity (ECPC) within the Maastricht University Faculty of Law. His main research focuses are cybersecurity, data management/sharing and data protection as a corporate social responsibility, which together can be used to help organisations responsibly further their economic targets and at the same time positively contribute to the development of a fair data-centric society.

Qualified lawyer specialized in ICT, Privacy & Cybersecurity admitted to the Milan Bar and registered to the Amsterdam Bar. He is a Founding Partner of ICT Legal Consulting (ICTLC), an international law firm, and ICT Cyber Consulting, a company specialized in information/data security. Prof. Dr. Balboni is a Recommended Lawyer ranked by The Legal 500 EMEA 2023 in the areas of Data Privacy and Data Protection and Industry Focus: TMT. He is the Chairman of the European Patent Office (EPO) Data Protection Board, Member of the EUMETSAT Data Protection Supervisory Authority, Member of the Europrivacy Board of Experts, Member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on B2B data sharing and cloud computing contracts, and of the Cloud Security Alliance’s AI Safety Expert Group. Prof. Dr. Balboni furthermore advises governments on national matters concerning cybersecurity and privacy and in 2018, he drafted the national Surinamese Privacy and Data Protection Law.

Karolina Podstawa

Karolina Podstawa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European and International Law of the University of Maastricht. Since September 2019 she has also joined Maastricht European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity.

She represented the UM in the project TRIIAL: TRust, Independence, Impartiality and Accountability of judges focused on the identification of best practices in cooperation between judges across the European Union geared towards safeguarding judicial independence, impartiality and accountability.

Prior to the appointment at UM, she acted as a part-time Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź (Poland) as well as the Senior Researcher at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC, Venice). Karolina holds a PhD from the European University Institute and MAs in Law and Administration (2008), English Language and Literature (2009) from the University of Łódź, Poland as well as the LLM from the EUI (2009).

Within ECPC, Karolina is co-coordinating the Advanced Master in Privacy, Cybersecurity and Data Management. She also teaches a master course.