Beatrice Kornelis

Beatrice Kornelis is a senior legal professional with extensive experience in research governance, compliance and organisational resilience within large-scale research environments. She currently serves as Head of Administrative Area Legal, Resilience and Procurement at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Austria’s largest non-university research institute. A committed European, she has an Austrian and French/Italian background, is married to a Dutch engineer, and has lived in Austria, France, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands.

Beatrice has worked at AIT since 2004 and has held senior management positions since 2006, leading the Legal and Industrial Property unit and advising on complex legal matters at the intersection of research, innovation, security and compliance. In 2021, she assumed an expanded management role as Head of Administrative Area at AIT. In this capacity, she is responsible for a broad portfolio of strategic and operational units, including Legal and Industrial Property, Purchasing and Logistics, Facility Management and Lab Integration, Workers’ Security, as well as oversight of the organisation’s Data Protection Officer and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

In addition, she is a member of the AIT AI Task Force, serves as one of AIT’s representatives in EECARO, and is a core member of the Legal Group of EARTO. Through this comprehensive mandate, she plays a central role in ensuring legally secure, resilient and trustworthy research operations across the institute. Her work is characterised by a strong focus on risk management, physical and digital security, intellectual property protection, export control law, and a pragmatic, solution-oriented approach.

She holds an Austrian Master’s degree in Law (Mag. iur.) from the University of Vienna and an LL.M. (Eur.) from the Europa-Institut Saarbrücken, specialising in European law, the law of international organisations, media law and intellectual property law. She also completed her German law studies at Saarland University, with a focus on intellectual property and competition law.

With her multilingual background and international education, Beatrice brings a strong European perspective to research security discussions. In the context of Open Science, she actively addresses the challenge of balancing openness, collaboration and transparency with the protection of sensitive knowledge, research infrastructure, dual-use technologies, emerging technologies and compliance with export control regulations.