Bert Verdonck leads the Luxembourg National Data Service, a new governmental organisation created to solve the hard problems of governance between multiple institutions, the technical challenges of data platforms at scale, and the compliance with ELSI requirements in cross-border settings. They explore the adoption of the Gaia-X framework, scouting for European initiatives with a potential to scale, cross-border and cross-sector. In his prior role at Philips, he explored the various European health data space initiatives, to improve health data sharing for primary care delivery as well as for secondary use and research. In his 26 years at Philips, he delivered results in the cloud/edge/data domain, via modern software stacks, healthcare informatics solutions within the hospital and in the home, solving complex data challenges, and leading people in the transformation towards data spaces. He has a PhD in medical image processing from ENST Paris (France) and a MSc in electrotechnical engineering from KULeuven (Belgium).