Dr Rossana Ducato

Biography

Rossana is Senior Lecturer of IT Law and Regulation at the University of Aberdeen, School of Law.

Her research interests are always pursued in a comparative vein and range from Privacy and Data Protection to Consumer protection, Intellectual Property Law, Law and Design, and Law and Behavioural Science, with a special focus on the problems related to new technologies and their impact on society.

She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and chapters in scholarly books about issues related to law and technology with particular attention to the platform economy, Big and Open Data, cloud computing, drones, research biobanks, and health information technologies.

Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher in Law at Université Catholique de Louvain and Université Saint-Louis de Bruxelles (Belgium) and at the University of Trento (Italy). Over the years, she has been accepted as visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg; the Max Planck for Innovation and Competition Law, Munich; the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS), UC Berkeley; the Institute for Information Law (IvIR), University of Amsterdam; Waseda University, Tokyo; CREATe, University of Glasgow; CIPPM, Bournemouth University; AIBHL, Yonsei University.

Research Overview

Rossana's research interests include:

• IT Law

• Privacy and data protection

• Intellectual property law (in particular, copyright and database protection)

• Consumer protection law

• Law and design

• Law and behavioural sciences

Current Research

• The regulation of AI in a comparative perspective (UK, EU, Japan, Korea)

• Legal aspects of deepfake technology

• Text and data mining exceptions in copyright

Funding and Grants

• Korean Foundation Fellowship for Field Research (2025)
• Daiwa Foundation grant "Deepfake and the Law" (2024-2025), with Bournemouth University and Waseda University (Japan)
• Canon foundation fellowship (2023)
• Erasmus+ Jean Monnet grant for the Module "Clinic on EU Digital Rights, Law, and Design", UCLouvain (2022-2025)
• The Royal Society of Edinburgh research network grant for "SCOTLIN - Scottish Law and Innovation Network" (co-applicant) (2021-2023)
• Erasmus+ Jean Monnet grant for the Network "SHINE - SHaring economy and INequalities across Europe". Partners: University of Valencia, UCLouvain, University of Barcelona, University of Bologna, University of Palermo (2019-2022)
• Erasmus+ Jean Monnet grant for the Module "European IT Law by Design", UCLouvain (2018-2021)
• International Development Research Center (IDRC) grant for the study "Protection of users in the platform economy. A European perspective". Project developed within the research network "Policy frameworks for digital platforms – Moving from openness to inclusion", lead by IT for Change.
• Innoviris grant "ATTRACT brains to Brussels" for the project "The Internet of Platforms: an empirical study on private ordering and consumer protection in the sharing economy" (2017-2020)