Samson Y. Esayas

Dr Samson Esayas is an Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School and a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He specialises in teaching data protection law, AI regulation, and competition law at BI and has previously taught at the University of Oslo and Queen Mary University of London. He has extensive experience working on several EU and Norwegian government financed research projects dealing with regulatory aspects of various technologies. His research explores the power dynamics stemming from control over data and mediated communications, with a focus on how these evolving power paradigms are addressed by competition and data privacy law. Dr Esayas has published in several renowned journals covering these issues. His article, ‘The Idea of Emergent Properties in Data Privacy: Towards a Holistic Approach’, has been ranked as one of the top ten privacy papers of 2017 and ‘must read’ scholarships for policy makers by the Future of Privacy Forum. He earned his PhD from the University of Oslo in 2020 and his dissertation was awarded His Majesty the King’s Gold Medal for outstanding research in 2021. His book on the Interface between data privacy law and competition law has been published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Dr. Esayas was a visiting researcher at Berkman Klein Center in 2023 where he collaborated on a project that seeks to offer a global perspective on the societal impacts of AI and its governance.