Kristof Van Quathem

Kristof Van Quathem is Data Protection Advisor at the Covington & Burling LLP law firm  and focuses on data protection compliance in the life science and ICT sector.

Mr. Van Quathem holds a degree in European politics and administration of the College of Europe (Bruges) and master degrees in international relations and history from the universities of Antwerp and Ghent. 

Since joining C&B in 1998, he has assisted a wide range of multi-national pharmaceutical and medical device companies in the development and implementation of data protection compliance programmes.  These programmes implicate a large variety of research-related issues, including pseudonymization methods, the status of key-coded data, consent requirements, further use of research data and body samples, contract and security requirements, and concerns related to the international transfer of personal data.

Increasingly, this work relates to matters he works on for the ICT industry, for example, in the context of online patient communities, the development of large-scale research databases, biobanks, and online patient monitoring technologies.  Recently, he has been heavily involved in the development of a first truly global standard on data protection, in the field of sports, also involving large scale collections of health data and body samples.