Academic interests and background
Rebecca Schmidt obtained a PhD from the European University Institute and an LLM in International and Legal Studies from New York University. Before starting her current position, she was an assistant professor in law at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University. She has also held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin, and a research fellowship within the Transnational Business Governance Interactions Project (at Osgoode Hall Law School and at SUNY Buffalo). Moreover, during her PhD studies she was a visiting fellow in the GlobalTrust Project at Tel Aviv University. In her research Rebecca examines a key feature of globalisation, the rise of regulation beyond the state. She focuses on the emergence of transnational regulatory cooperation between public and private actors, and in particular the interaction between expertise-driven private regulation and more traditional political authority in multi-level transnational regulatory networks. Her monograph 'Regulatory Integration across Borders' is published with Cambridge University Press. As a member of the VIROS project Rebecca focuses on the interplay between public (particularly EU-level) regulation of robots and AI systems with privately developed regulatory regimes (as found in international technical standards, industry codes, as well as best practices).