Mathias Vermeulen oversees our Strategic Research and Insights work on AI, online safety and other digital policy and data governance topics.

Mathias brings more than 15 years of experience as a strategy advisor, expert and organizer at the intersection of law, policy and new technologies. His work has been featured in prominent publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired or TechCrunch and has been cited by the US Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, Europol and the European Parliament.

Before co-leading AWO, Mathias was a strategy advisor to the Mozilla Foundation, the global nonprofit behind the Firefox browser, where he developed initiatives to improve independent researcher access to data and open-source auditing of consumer technology platforms in Europe and the United States.

From 2014 to 2019, Vermeulen worked as a digital policy advisor in the European Parliament, where he worked on AI, online safety policies, copyright reform, digital trade chapters of trade agreements, digital rights and the EU’s export control regulation of dual-use items.

Mathias was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Law, Science, Technology and Society at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he is still an associate fellow, and the European University Institute in Florence, where he managed and participated in a number of large European research projects that focused on the legal and ethical challenges of the use of new technologies.

Earlier in his career, Vermeulen was the lead investigator and assistant to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Human Rights While Countering Terrorism for three years. He began his professional career at the Special Procedures Unit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva.

He holds a Ph.D. in European privacy and data protection law from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and has a joint European Masters in Human Rights and Democratization from the European Inter-University Centre in Italy and the University of Hamburg.