Dwayne is a PhD candidate within Innovation Studies at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development. His research focuses on exploring the suboptimal level of data-sharing in the European Union (EU) and its implications for the production of social goods and services. He is particularly interested in how data donation initiatives can act as intermediary services to facilitate data-sharing and address societal challenges more efficiently.

The recent regulatory reforms in the EU, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Governance Act, have empowered data subjects' rights to share their data. These reforms have opened up opportunities for grassroots data donation initiatives to emerge and share data with other actors to tackle complex societal issues. 

This PhD project aims to study the evolution of governance practices employed by both grassroots data donation initiatives and top-down data altruism organizations. These practices will be examined across different institutional logics to contribute conceptually and empirically to the theory of institutional change and innovation studies.