Christiane Wendehorst has been Professor of Civil Law at the University of Vienna since 2008. She is a founding member, former President (2017-2021) and since 2021 Scientific Director of the European Law Institute (ELI), Deputy Director of the Institute for Innovation and Digitalization in Law as well as a member of the Bioethics Commission at the Federal Chancellery and Vice-President of the Austrian Jurists’ Association (ÖJT). She is President of the Philosophical-Historical Class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and was previously Chair of the Academic Council of the ÖAW from 2017-2022. She is also an expert in the EU Commission’s Expert Group on B2B data sharing and cloud computing contracts. Furthermore, she is an elected member of Academia Europea (AE), the International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) and the American Law Institute (ALI).
Her current research focuses on the legal aspects of digitalisation and she has acted as an expert on issues such as digital content, the Internet of Things, AI and the data economy, e.g. for the European Commission, the European Parliament, the German Federal Government, the ELI and the ALI. From 2018-2019, she co-chaired the Data Ethics Commission of the German Federal Government. Most recently, she led the transatlantic project “Principles for a Data Economy” on the European side as well as a number of other projects in the field of digitalization, including topics such as digital product safety and product liability, biometric techniques and fairness in artificial intelligence. Before moving to Vienna, she held chairs in Göttingen (1999-2008) and Greifswald (1998-99) and was Managing Director of the Chinese-German Institute of Law (2000-2008).