Our people

Prof. Ananiadou's specialisms are in natural language processing. She is director of The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and played a leading role in its establishment, negotiating strategic links with both academia and industry. Her research covers computational terminology, information extraction, document classification, and query expansion. These have been applied in various domains, including medicine, environment, and law. Sophia led a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with a MLaTI member to embed a state-of-the-art platform for legal text mining and predictive modelling.

Gerard is Professor of Strategic Management and Behavioural Science at Alliance Manchester Business School. Internationally renowned for his work at the intersections of psychology and strategic management, Gerard has served in a variety of major leadership positions. An elected Fellow of the British Academy of Management, British Psychological Society, Chartered Management Institute, Royal Society of Arts, and the Academy of Social Sciences, and an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Orkun is Professor of Commercial Law, he studied his LLB and MA in Turkey, LLM in the USA, and PhD at the University of Manchester; he is delighted to return to his alma mater. Since 2022 Orkun is Academic Director of MLaTI and plans to launch and lead a new Legal Innovation Research Group which will complement and feed in to MLaTI. His teaching and research interests are in the field of secured transactions, banking & financial law, and arbitration & mediation. He has been involved in law reform initiatives under the auspices of UNCITRAL and Unidroit.

Joseph has written extensively in the area of law and technology, including on the application of blockchain in the energy markets and the deployment of AI/Data analytics to enhance ESG. His current research projects focus on the use of DAOs in Web3 as an innovative form of collaboration and sharing. He is a member of the LawTech Advisory Council of the Astana International Financial Centre and co-director of the Manchester LawTech Initiative.

Nadia is Senior Lecturer in Information and Decision Systems at Alliance Manchester Business School, and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Nadia works on the interface of decision behaviour, analysis, and support, her Turing research focuses on the development of AI tools with explainable and interpretable outputs. Nadia also chairs the Decision Analysis special interest group – DASIG.

Bijan is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science and a member of the Information Management Group (IMG) since May of 2006. Before that, he was a faculty research associate in the Mindswap group at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). Bijan’s academic specialties are philosophy and computer science, with research specialisms include semantic web, knowledge representation and reasoning, his teaching includes semi-structured data and the web.

Claire is a Professor of Legal Education at The University of Manchester and a National and Principal Fellow of the HEA. She is the director of external relations in the School of Social Sciences and is also the director of the Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre. Claire is driving forward the integration of legal tech into the curriculum and has created the Manchester Justice Hub in partnership with students.

Claire is a Professor of Legal Education at The University of Manchester and a National and Principal Fellow of the HEA. She is the director of external relations in the School of Social Sciences and is also the director of the Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre. Claire is driving forward the integration of legal tech into the curriculum and has created the Manchester Justice Hub in partnership with students.