International

Anna Pouliou is an internationally recognized data protection expert with over 15 years of experience in this field. She is a qualified attorney and has held leading roles and led privacy teams in major global corporations but also worked as a partner in the Big4, offering data protection advisory services to private and public sectors alike. In February 2024, she was appointed Chair of the Data Protection Commission at CERN, the data protection supervisory authority of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Anna is also a lecturer and senior fellow in Data Governance, International Privacy Laws, Artificial Intelligence and other related topics at the Universities of Saint-Gallen and Maastricht as well as a regular speaker on technology, IoT, AI, digitalization and data protection with over 100 speaking engagements delivered around the world. She has been teaching at the Data Protection Academy training DPAs globally as well as DPOs in humanitarian action for the United Nations, the Red Cross and other NGOs in Africa and in Asia. Anna is multilingual, speaking a total of seven languages.  

Throughout her career, Anna has been actively involved in the advocacy discussions in Brussels and Washington DC since the birth of the GDPR as well as in the international debate on data transfers. Between 2017 and 2022, she was one of the 27 members of the GDPR Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group advising the European Commission on GDPR implementation on behalf of Business Europe. She has also accompanied the European Commission during bilateral discussions on data protection with the US Congress, the governments and privacy regulators of India, Indonesia, Singapore and during multilateral ones at the G20 in Japan. Anna has also acted as National Rapporteur for data protection for the International Federation for European Law (FIDE) in the team of Prof. Vassilis Skouris, former President of the Court of Justice of the European Union.