Peter Van den Bossche has been a Member of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization since 2009 and served as its Chair in 2015. He is Director of Studies and Professor of International Economic Law at World Trade Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland. He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium ; Maastricht University, the Netherlands ; the University of Barcelona, Spain ; and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador.
From 1997 to 2001, he was counsellor at the Appellate Body Secretariat, and in 2001 served as Acting Director of the Secretariat. In the early 1990s, he worked as référendaire at the European Court of Justice. He studied law at the University of Antwerp (Lic. jur.), the University of Michigan (LLM) and the European University Institute, Florence (PhD). Werner Zdouc has been Director of the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat since 2006.
He obtained a law degree from the University of Graz in Austria and then went on to earn an LLM from the University of Michigan and a PhD from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. Dr Zdouc joined the WTO Legal Affairs Division in 1995 and the Appellate Body Secretariat in 2001. In 2008 to 2009 he chaired the WTO Joint Advisory Committee to the Director-General. He has been a lecturer and visiting professor at Vienna Economic University, the Universities of St Gallen, Zurich, Barcelona, Seoul and Shanghai and the Geneva Graduate Institute.
From 1987 to 1989, he worked for governmental and non-governmental development aid organizations in Austria and Latin America.