Leona is a doctoral researcher at CiTiP, funded by a PhD Fellowship for fundamental research from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

Her research explores the intersection of copyright and data protection law in the context of generative AI, focusing on the legality of data scraping practices involving both personal and non-personal data. Using Large Language Models (LLMs) as a case study, she examines whether a unified concept of data can be developed across legal domains, addressing a critical gap in current scholarship. Applying a digital constitutionalism framework, her work offers a fundamental rights-based perspective that seeks to bridge fragmented legal approaches in both the EU and the US. Her findings are also tested within the EU’s data infrastructure initiative, the Common European Data Spaces. Leona was awarded 1st prize at the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP) 2024 PhD competition for her doctoral research, “Unifying the concept of Data: Data Scraping for Generative AI Development in the EU and US”.

Leona works on the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC) project, contributing to the development of common requirements and best practices for sovereign European data spaces.