Vasiliki Kosta is Associate Professor of European Law at Leiden University. Her research is characterised by an interest in EU Fundamental Rights Law and more broadly in ‘horizontal’ issues, i.e. institutional and constitutional questions spanning different core policy areas of EU Law. She currenlty holds the Dutch NWO Vidi grant for, and is lead researcher of, the project: “The EU Fundamental Right to ‘Freedom of the Arts and Sciences’: Exploring the Limits on the Commercialisation of Academia”. She is member member of the standing Committee for Freedom of Scientific Practice (Commissie voor de Vrijheid van Wetenschapsbeofening) of the of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and member of the KNAW Committee producing the advisory report on legal safeguards for academic freedom as requested by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science. She is also member of the Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) of the KNAW, and as of April 2026 board member.

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Kosta’s current research focuses on academic freedom and the commercialisation of academia in EU law, taking an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together the legal doctrinal method, law-in-conetxt, comparative consituttional law, practical philosophy, sociology and higher education studies. This research builds on a research path marked by different research strands: the role of the EU political institutions, and of EU legislative and administrative action in protecting fundamental rights within the Internal Market; ex ante fundamental rights protection mechanisms in the EU, the relationship between the EU and the ECHR, and the principle of proportionality in EU law.

Kosta defended her PhD research on ‘Fundamental Rights in Internal Market Legislation’ at the European University Institute in Florence, where also worked as a research associate at the Academy of European Law, EUI Florence. She was a ‘stagiaire’ at the Court of Justice of the EU and she completed a traineeship at the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.

Kosta was visiting fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative law and at Humboldt University. She held am Emile Noël Fellowship at the Jean Monnet Center of New York University (NYU) School of Law and was Senior Fellow at the Leuven Institute of Advanced Studies. She is also Guest Research Fellow at the Lisbon Center for Research.

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