Iverna McGowan is currently serving as Tech & Human Rights Advisor at UN Human Rights (OHCHR). She founded and then Directed the Centre for Democracy & Technology from 2020 to 2024. She has been listed by EU Insider in 2024 as one of the most influential people on digital policy and by POLITICO in 2017 as one of the most influential women on EU policy and law making. Politico said that [she] "makes the voices of human rights victims heard in Brussels’ corridors of power". Iverna was Executive Director of Amnesty International’s Office in Brussels and Advocacy Director for Europe for seven years and covered EU and Council of Europe issues. Prior to that she worked in the Human Rights Unit at the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, and later as a legal researcher for an expert member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). She was awarded the Sinti and Roma European Civil Rights Prize in 2016 for her work on equal access to education for Roma children. She holds an LL.M in EU Law and was a Top 3% scholar of the University of Maastricht, she also holds an honors degree from Trinity College Dublin, where she studied European Studies. She has previously served on the boards of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, Transparency International. She was a member of the Advisory Panel to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, and member of the Advisory Board of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s Privacy Hub. She is a frequent commentator on technology’s impact on society, human rights, EU foreign policy and gender equality and has contributed to pieces by Euronews, CNN, BBC, RTE, and Reuters.