Leigh Hancher is Professor of European Law at the University of Tilburg. She is a part-time Professor at the Florence School of Regulation within the European University Institute and the Director of the FSR Energy Union Law Area. Her research interests include energy market regulation, EU state aids and energy market governance.  Her expertise, as well as her academic research, is focused on the changing role of the government in stimulating the liberalisation of traditionally heavily regulated sectors. She has also been a Professor at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, a Visiting Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, Head of Legal at the Energy Charter Secretariat in Brussels and a member of the Dutch Academic Advisory Council (WRR).

Leigh studied law at the Universities of Glasgow and Sheffield, and at the EUI. She obtained her doctorate in law, with distinctions, from the University of Leiden in 1989.

Ian is a Project Manager of the FSR and works with the team on all externally funded projects.

Since graduating, he has worked at three of the former UK Research Councils (ESRC, AHRC and STFC), now UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), as programme manager for a wide range of national and international funding schemes. He subsequently worked at the UK’s liaison office for European funding programmes in Brussels, the UK Research Office (UKRO), for more than four years. He joined the EUI in March 2018 initially working on the 2018 and 2019 editions of the Institute’s largest annual conference, The State of the Union, before joining the RSCAS and FSR in October 2019.

Dr Adrien de Hauteclocque is the Head of Cabinet of the President of the General Court of the European Union and a non-governmental adviser to the French Competition Authority in the context of the International Competition Network (ICN).

On the academic front, he is a Part-time Professor at the Florence School of Regulation (European University Institute) and an associated researcher at Chaire Gouvernance et Régulation, Université Paris-Dauphine. His research interests include EU competition and state aid law, competition policy in network industries and the law & economics of energy regulation. Before moving to the EU institutions, he pursued his academic career at the University of Manchester and at the European University Institute where he co-founded the “EU Energy Union Law” Area of the Florence School of Regulation. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and has published numerous books, academic articles and book chapters in the last 15 years. He serves as a member of the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) Training Advisory Board and holds regular teaching commitments for the CEER Legal Task Force and, as an invited Professor, HEC Paris (France).

Dr de Hauteclocque obtained his PhD in Law from the University of Manchester (UK) and holds a MSc in Management from EM Lyon (France) and a MSc in Economic Policy from Strathclyde University (UK).

Lucila de Almeida is Part-time Professor at the European University, being affiliated to the Florence School of Regulation at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies since 2020. At EUI/RSCAS/FSR, Lucila has taken on the role of principal investigator or task leader in several externally funded major research projects, including the European Commission (2025, EC Study on Consumer rights and protection in innovative energy services), Horizon Europe (2024-2028, U2Demo – Use of open-source P2P energy sharing platforms for energy democratisation), the International Energy Agency (2019-2025, UserTCP Global Observatory on P2P, Community Self-consumption, and Transactive Energy Models). Besides the research projects, Lucila is involved in several executive trainings and policy debates at EUI/RSCAS/FSR. Her primary field of research is energy law, with a focus on its private law dimension, including contracts in local, retail and wholesale markets, consumer law, and market integrity (REMIT).

Lucila is also an Associate Professor at NOVA University of Lisbon, NOVSA School of Law, holding the Abreu Chair in ESG Impact, Climate and Energy Law, and coordinating their master’s in international and European Law, and the NOVA Green Lab. She has also been an invited professor at FGV-Rio since 2025. She holds a PhD and an LLM in EU Law from the European University Institute and has licenses to practice law in Portugal and Brazil.

Before joining the faculty at NOVA, Lucila has been a tenured Assistant Professor at Wageningen University & Research (2020-2022), Edmond J. Safra Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics at Tel Aviv University (2019-2020), postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki (2017-2019), visiting professor at Università Degli Studi di Padova (2019), and visiting researcher at Louvain Global College Law, UCLouvain (2017).

Lucila is a member of the editorial boards, serving as Associate Editor of Competition and Regulation in Network Industries (Sage Publishing) and editor of Energy Research & Social Science (Elsevier). Her work to date has resulted in numerous publications in international journals such as Yearbook of European Law and Yearbook of International Environmental Law (Oxford Journal), Energy Policy (Elsevier), Transnational Environmental Law (Cambridge Journal), RECIEL (Wiley), and books published with Hart Publishing, Edward Elgar and Springer.

International energy expert, LL.M. (UK & Romania) with extensive experience gained in law firms, EU institutions, academia and in the private sector.