Giuseppe Abbamonte was appointed Director of the Media and Data Directorate in January 2014. The Directorate is, amongst many other things, responsible for the development and follow-up of the European regulatory framework on audiovisual media and the European Big Data Strategy.

Shortly after his appointment as Director, Giuseppe delivered a major Communication setting out the Commission’s strategy on Data called “Towards a thriving data-driven economy” and set up the European Public Private Partnership on Big Data Value.

Recently he delivered the new legislative proposal amending the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, adopted by the European Commission on 25 May 2016.
On 1st July 2016 he took over the new Media Policy Directorate in charge of, amongst other policies, copyright reform, AVMSD and support to the media industry.
In his former positions, he was the head of the electronic communications policy unit and then of the cybersecurity and on-line privacy unit. As part of the latter job, he supervised and directed the elaboration of the European Cybersecurity Strategy and of a proposal for a European law on network and information security. He also has an extensive experience in complex merger cases and in consumer law.

Before joining the Commission he was an associate in an international law firm in Milan for four years (1989/1992), where he dealt mainly with commercial law and competition law.
He is the author of several publications mainly in English law magazines.

Ľuboš Kukliš is Executive Director of the Council for Broadcasting and Retransmission of Slovakia. He serves as Chair of the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA). In the field of media and administrative law he is also active in lecturing and writing – most recently Electronic Media Regulation (Wolters Kluwer, 2015), Slovak Broadcasting Act – A Commentary (Wolters Kluwer, 2016).

Renate Schroeder is the Director of the European Federation of Journalists, the largest organisation of journalists in Europe, representing over 320,000 journalists in 72 journalists’ organisations across 44 countries. In 1993 she started working for the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and since 2003 she works for the EFJ. Advocacy at EU and Council of Europe level; presentation of EFJ at international meetings and fact-finding media freedom missions; project work, communication and assistance in several EFJ expert groups including on freelances, broadcasting media literacy and digital journalism, are part of her work-load in the small dynamic Brussels office.

Renate Schroeder studied International Relations and Political Science at Boston University (Bachelor’s Degree in 1988, Magna Cum Laude) and in Berlin at the Free University (Masters in 1992). Major themes during her Masters program were nationalism, integration and refugee policy.

Renate worked among other at the United Nations, New York, the research institute FAST in Berlin and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation in Brussels before she joined the IFJ/EFJ team. She is of German nationality and speaks English, French, Italian, German and Spanish (passive).

Assoc. Prof. Ceren Sözeri is a faculty member at the Communication Department of Galatasaray University. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degree from Galatasaray University. She received her Ph.D. from Marmara University. She has published on political economy of the media, media policies, freedom of the press, ethical issues, besides, discrimination and hate speech in traditional and online media in Turkey. She has been the Ethical Journalism Network’s (EJN) representative in Turkey since 2015 and a columnist for Evrensel daily.

Vaclav Stetka is since 2016 Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Between 2009 and 2013 he worked as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, then he was appointed Head of the Political Communication Research Group (PolCoRe) at Charles University in Prague. He is currently participating on several international research projects, including the COST IS1308 Action on Populist Political Communication (2014-2018), Reuters Institute’s Digital News Project (since 2015) and Media Pluralism Monitor, EUI (since 2015). Since 2016 he serves as Vice-Chair of the Political Communication Section (ECREA). His research interests involve social media, political communication, media ownership and the relationship between media and democracy.

Urška Umek is Head of Media Unit at the Council of Europe’s Information Society Department, responsible for developing standards in the area of media freedom. She previously worked as a lawyer at the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights (2012 – 2016) and as a lawyer-linguist at the Court of Justice of the European Union (2008), after starting her career as a legal adviser at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia, where she also headed the Research and International Cooperation Department from 2009 until 2012. She contributed to the 2011 “Commentary to the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia” and to the book “The Constitutional Reforms of the Constitutional Justice”.

Prof. Madeleine de Cock Buning is part-time Professor at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute. In her role at the European University Institute, Professor de Cock Buning will lead work on Digital Politics, Economy and Societies at the School of Transnational Governance.

Professor de Cock Buning was Chair of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on fake news and disinformation, assigned to provide the commission with options on how to react to the dissemination of fake news both online and offline. Dr. Prof. de Cock Buning is appointed professor at the Faculty of Law, Economy and Governance (UU) with a chair in Copyright Law and Media and Communication Law.