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Stefaan Verhulst

Co-founder and Chief Research and Development Officer, The GovLab, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of The GovLab, where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology. Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance.

Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good. He more than a decade as Chief of Research for the Markle Foundation, where he continues to serve as Senior Advisor. At Markle, he was responsible for overseeing strategic research on all the priority areas of the Foundation. Many of Markle’s reports have been translated into legislation and executive orders and have informed the creation of new organizations and businesses. He has taught at New York University’s Department of Culture and Communications and the London School of Economics. He has been a senior research fellow at Central European University’s Center for Media and Communications, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Global Communication Studies, and Wolfson College.

Verhulst was the UNESCO Chairholder in Communications Law and Policy for the UK, a former lecturer on Communications Law and Policy issues in Belgium, and Founder and Co-Director of the International Media and Info-Comms Policy and Law Studies at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He has served as a consultant to numerous international and national organizations, including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, UNESCO, World Bank, UNDP, USAID, the UK Department for International Development among others. He has been a grant recipient of the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Markle Foundation. Verhulst is also founder and editor of numerous journals including the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Communications Law in Transition Newsletter.