Margaret Varilek is a USA-trained and licensed attorney with an LL.M. in international economic law from the University of Kent, UK. Early in her career she was awarded the top mark for her master thesis for investigating how reverse-payment settlements for pharmaceutical patent infringement cases were being used as a vehicle to thwart antitrust laws in EU and US. She started her legal career working in the USA, then moved onto Brussels, Belgium, Japan and Italy, gaining a vast knowledge of practice areas including EU trade law, regulation of EU concentrations, data protection, antitrust and competition law. 

 At home in northeast Italy since 2014, she developed expertise in regulatory compliance for consumer goods for a large international manufacturer. As a member of the global R&D quality team, she was the reference point between legal, regulatory affairs and product development to provide guidance on placing products on the market, CE marking, EU product safety, EU chemical laws, WEEE/ROHS regulations, eco-design, energy labelling, and circular economy legal trends. 

 Maintaining her professional connection to Brussels, she frequently participates as an ethics expert for the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission on H2020 and Horizon Europe proposals and projects. She was recently appointed to the Security Advisory Board for the Horizon Europe funded project, PQ React.

Margaret’s newest path brought her to join up with Smartlex to explore the burgeoning field of regulatory law of new technologies in their big data landscapes.