VentranetAbout Sandra
Sandra Wachter is Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford, where she leads the Governance of Emerging Technologies research programme. Since 2025 she has also held an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for AI and heads the Technology and Regulation department at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.
Her research deals with the legal and ethical questions raised by AI and other new technologies, including explainability, bias and fairness, generative AI, platform regulation, data protection and human rights. Her work on explainable AI includes a 2018 paper with Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell on counterfactual explanations under the GDPR. The bias test Conditional Demographic Disparity, which she developed, has been implemented by Amazon Web Services.
Wachter joined the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute. She earned her doctorate in law at the University of Vienna and an additional social-science qualification at Oxford. Earlier she worked at the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Austrian Ministry of Health, and she has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Her awards include the O²RB Excellence in Impact Award and the CognitionX AI Ethics Award.
