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Since 2022, Kerstin Lopatta has served as Vice Chair of the Sustainability Reporting Board of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) and Special Liaison to the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). While at EFRAG, Professor Lopatta has been responsible for the first set of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
Professor Lopatta is professor of Financial Accounting, Auditing and Sustainability at the University of Hamburg and adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance at the University of Luxembourg. She is also affiliated with City University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor. She received her doctoral degree from Goethe University Frankfurt.
Professor Lopatta has extensive experience in sustainability reporting and financial accounting in practice and research. She is a member of the Sustainability Reporting Technical Committee of the Accounting Standards Committee of Germany (ASCG) and has chaired the ASCG working group on Climate Reporting. She also serves as a member of the Sustainable Finance Council of the German Ministry of Finance and as an academic observer of the Platform on Sustainable Finance. She has been involved in developing, improving and implementing a variety of disclosure standards in different areas of sustainability reporting, including co-reviewing the adaptation of the German Sustainability Code to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the EU Taxonomy.
During her career, Professor Lopatta completed several international research stays including at New York University’s Stern School of Business and Copenhagen Business School. In her research, she investigates empirically the effects of environmental, social, and governance factors on business and society. She also covers corporate governance topics such as board structure and diversity. Professor Lopatta is a member of the supervisory board and of the audit committee at Freenet AG and a member of the supervisory board and chairwomen of the audit committee at EQS Group AG. Before embarking on her academic career, Professor Lopatta worked as an audit assistant for Deloitte.
