Bio
Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder of the Governance Laboratory (The GovLab) at New York University (NYU), an action research centre focused on improving decision making using advances in science and technology — including data and collective intelligence.
He is also, among other positions and affiliations, the Editor-in-Chief of Data & Policy, an open-access journal by Cambridge University Press; the Research Director of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance; Chair of the Data for Children Collaborative with Unicef; a member of the High-Level Expert Group to the European Commission on Business-to-Government Data Sharing; and of the Expert Group to Eurostat on using private sector data for official statistics.
In 2018 he was recognized as one of the 10 Most Influential Academics in Digital Government globally (as part of the Top 100 in Digital Government) by the global policy platform Apolitical.
Before joining NYU full time, Verhulst spent more than a decade as Chief of Research for the Markle Foundation, where he continues to serve as Senior Advisor. Previously at Oxford University, he was the UNESCO Chairholder in Communications Law and Policy and co-founded and was the Head of the Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Center for Socio-Legal Studies. He was the Socio-Legal Fellow at Wolfson College, and is still an emeritus fellow at Oxford. He also taught for several years at the London School of Economics and was Founder and Co-Director of the International Media and Info-Comms Policy and Law Studies (IMPS) at the University of Glasgow School of Law.
He has published widely — including seven books — and his writings and work have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Project Syndicate, Wall Street Journal, The Conversation, and Open Democracy (among other outlets). He is asked regularly to present at international conferences including TED, Collision, and the UN World Data Forum. Numerous organizations have sought his counsel — including the WorldBank; IDB, USAID, DFID, IDRC, AFP, the European Commission, Council of Europe, the World Economic Forum, UNICEF, OECD, Un-OCHA, UNDP, and several other international and national bodies.