Karolina Podstawa, Assistant Professor (K.I.)

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.

Karolina's fields of expertise include the European Union law, external relations of the EU and fundamental rights as well as European digital regulation. The focus of her current research activities is placed on personal data protection at intersection with other areas such as data sharing and supply chain management, smart cities, or cybersecurity.

She is the member of the management team of Advanced Master in Privacy, Cybersecurity and Data Management (LLM). At the UM she is a member of MCEL and Law and Tech Lab. 

Prior to the appointment at Maastricht University, she acted as an Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź (Poland) as well as the Senior Researcher at the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice (previously European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democrtatisation). She contributed to a series of projects dealing with the EU internal and external human rights polices, in particular: FRAME, ACTIONES, JUDCOOP, e-NACT, TRIIAL.

She 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).

She acted as a project manager for the EUI based Centre for Judicial Cooperation where she dealt with and contributed substantively both to internally and externally funded projects. Within this framework she organized and conducted training activities for judges collaborating widely with international judicial organizations and national judicial entities.

Previously, as an in-house lawyer she dealt with liberalization of the Polish telecommunications market and more recently she served in the Office of Personal Data Protection Authority in Poland (GIODO).