Washington — The Computer & Communications Industry Association is announcing new hires and promotions in DC and Europe, including a new leader of its Brussels office. CCIA is an international non-profit trade association that began more than 45 years ago to advocate for open systems, open networks and robust, competitive markets. The staff additions and promotions are aimed at enhancing our advocacy on issues from internet freedom to a thriving digital economy.
Marianela López-Galdos joins CCIA’s Washington office as Director of Competition and Regulatory Policy. She has spent the past five years at the George Washington University Competition Law Center as the Director of Research Projects in Comparative Competition Law Policy. Before that she was a competition policy consultant at the World Bank, an international legal consultant at the Federal Trade Commission and a compliance attorney at the Inter-American Development Bank. She earned her doctorate in law at George Washington University under Professor William Kovacic, Masters in Laws (LL.M.) from Georgetown Law School and the College of Europe Bruges, and her law degree from Universidad Pontificia DeComillas in Madrid.
“We welcome Marianela and her excellent work on international competition. Hiring someone of Marianela’s caliber emphasizes CCIA’s continued commitment to the type of dynamic competition that drives innovation and consumer welfare. CCIA started 45 years ago helping fight for competition policies that ended up launching the software industry and Silicon Valley. We have been on the forefront of various antitrust battles since IBM in the 1970s and AT&T in the 1980s and know the importance of getting it right when it comes to competition policy,” said CCIA President & CEO Ed Black.
Isabelle Styslinger also joins the DC team as Research Analyst. She will focus on emerging technology and contribute to CCIA’s Disruptive Competition Project (DisCo) blog. She graduated from Wellesley College and previously interned at Facebook, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, New America’s Open Technology Institute, ICANN, the FCC and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Marianela and Isabelle are joining CCIA’s strong DC staff, which also recently hired Joshua Landau from WilmerHale as its patent counsel. Landau has had an immediate impact with his recent amicus filings in several key cases, while expanding CCIA’s Patent Progress blog.
We are also pleased to announce that Christian Borggreen, who has served as Director of International Policy for CCIA’s Brussels office since 2014, is being promoted to Vice President and the new Head of Office for CCIA Europe. Current Vice President James Waterworth, who has done a remarkable job in strengthening our EU office in Brussels, will be moving over to work for a CCIA member company. Borggreen, previously served as Policy Advisor to the US Mission to the EU, advising senior State Department officials on digital policy issues. Before that, he managed digital policy advocacy for the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU.
Jakob Kucharczyk, who has served as CCIA’s Brussels director since 2010, will become Vice President for Competition Policy. Kucharczyk focused on EU competition and internal market law when earning two LL.M. degrees in European law from Maastricht University where he graduated cum laude and from the University of Edinburgh.
CCIA Europe has also hired Victoria Chatzi as Policy Assistant. Before joining CCIA, she was working in the Permanent Representation of Greece to the EU where she dealt mostly with the EU Digital Single Market proposals including copyright reform. Chatzi has received her LL.B. degree from Democritus University of Thrace in Greece. She holds also an LL.M. degree in European and International Business law from the Institute for European Studies in Brussels.
CCIA opened its Brussels office in 2009 to represent its members in connection with important European policy and regulatory issues. US and international tech companies and startups are increasingly facing great opportunities and complex challenges in many areas. We are committed to remaining deeply involved in European tech policy as the European Commission tries to implement a Digital Single Market and considers policies that will either enable or hinder its domestic tech and startup sectors.
“European policymakers are facing key decisions that will not only determine whether tech companies can easily offer services, but what online services millions of Europeans can access for everything from shopping to news and information — and whether that information is censored or filtered. We are at a critical juncture that will impact citizens’ communications and the economy going forward and we are grateful to have a strong Brussels team that James helped build that functions seamlessly as part of the wider CCIA to assist policymakers,” said Black.
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