Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga Ph.D. LL.M M.A. is Associate Professor and Director of Research at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University (NL). Eduard is an ERC Laureate and investigates the legal and regulatory aspects of robot and AI technologies.

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Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga Ph.D. LL.M M.A. is Associate Professor and Director of Research at eLaw -  Center for Law and Digital Technologies. Eduard is an ERC Laureate and investigates the legal and regulatory aspects of robot and AI technologies, with a special focus on healthcare, governance, diversity, and privacy. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga is the Principal Investigator (PI) of his ERC Starting Grant SAFE & SOUND: Harnessing experimentation to optimize the regulatory framing of healthcare robot technologies. Eduard is also the PI of eLaw's contribution to the Horizon Europe BIAS: Mitigating Diversity Biases of AI in the Labour Market and visiting scholar at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), where he explores the use of AI for preventing diabetic food syndrome at the vascular surgery department. 

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga was assistant professor at eLaw during 2021-2022. During this time, Eduard was the Principal Investigator of PROPELLING (2021-2022), an FSTP from the H2020 Eurobench project, a project using robot testing zones to support evidence-based robot policies. He is also the co-leader of the Gendering Algorithms project, an interdisciplinary pilot project aiming to explore the functioning, effects, and governance policies of AI-based gender classification systems. In 2021, he was the PI of LIAISON, an FSTP from the H2020 COVR project that aims to link robot development and policymaking to reduce the complexity of robot legal compliance. Eduard was also the co-leader of the Ethical, Legal, and Societal Aspects Working Group at the H2020 Cost Action 16116 on Wearable Robots and currently participates actively in the Social Responsibility Working Group at the H2020 Cost Action 19121 GoodBrother. In 2020 and 2022, Eduard served the European Commission in the Sub-Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI), connected products, and other new challenges in product safety to the Consumer Safety Network (CSN) to revise the General Product Safety Directive.

Eduard co-edited the book 'Law and Artificial intelligence' together with Prof. Bart Custers, co-wrote the book 'AI for Healthcare Robotics' with Hadassah Drukarch and published it with CRC Press; and wrote the book 'Robots, Healthcare, and the Law. Regulating Automation in Personal Care' with Routledge and is interested in human-robot interaction, responsible innovation, and the future of law. 

Previously, he was the recipient of a personal Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher under the COFUND LEaDing Fellows at the eLaw Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University (NL) (Jan 2019-Dec 2020). He also was a postdoc at the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Center at Queen Mary University of London (the UK, 2018) investigating the legal implications of cloud robotics; and at the University of Twente (NL, 2017) as a postdoc, exploring iterative regulatory modes for robot governance. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga holds an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate (EMJD) in Law, Science, and Technology coordinated by the University of Bologna (IT, 2017), an LL.M. from the University of Toulouse (FR, 2012), an MA from the Autonomous University of Madrid (ES), and an LL.B. from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (CAT, 2011). Eduard is also a qualified lawyer in Spain, fluent in Catalan, Spanish, English, Italian, and French, and his publications are available online.

Publications