Our people
Find out more about the people who make up the Manchester Law and Technology Initiative.
Academic staff
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Professor John Haskell, UoM Law School, Director
John D. Haskell is a Professor at The University of Manchester Law School and, since September 2024, serves as the Director to the Manchester Law and Technology Initiative. He is a former Fulbright Fellow and held various faculty appointments in the UK, Europe and America.
His research focuses on the cultures of expertise at the intersection of religion, money and digital technologies. He is currently in a three-year crypto industry funded research sabbatical. Moving forward, the objective with our MLaTI community is to innovate the law school curriculum training and to develop large-scale research projects in collaboration with our industry partners.
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Professor Nadia Papamichail, Lead for Alliance Manchester Business School
Nadia is a Professor of Management Sciences at Alliance Manchester Business School, and a 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 and on improving organisational decision-making practices through the use of technologies. Nadia also chairs the Decision Analysis special interest group – DASIG.
She has acted as academic lead for a number of Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) projects in the Legal Technology space including with MLaTI partners DWF and Jackson Lees Group including a recent project rated Outstanding which examined how advanced data science techniques can be combined with behavioural psychology profiling to tackle complex work processes.
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Professor Sophia Ananiadou, Lead for Department of Computer Science
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.
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Professor Orkun Akseli, UoM Law School
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.
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Professor Richard Allmendinger, Alliance Manchester Business School
Richard is Associate Dean for Business Engagement, Civic and Cultural Partnerships in the Faculty of Humanities, and Professor of Applied Artificial Intelligence at The University of Manchester. He is also a Senior Scientist at Eharo, AI Advisor for several early-stage businesses and River Capital, a Liverpool based fund management company. Currently, Richard is also creating a software spinout focused on improving computer source code security to reduce cyber security threats. Richard has been involved with MLaTI since the beginning of the initiative, and led on several research and students projects with members of the initiative.
Richard's research interests are in the field of data science and in particular in the development and application of optimisation and machine learning techniques to real-world problems arising in areas such as LegalTech, finance, economics, and forensics. Much of his research has been funded by UK funding bodies and industrial partners.
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Dr Amber Darr, Senior Lecturer at UoM Law School
Amber teaches Competition Law (both postgraduate and undergraduate) at The University of Manchester School of Law, and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society. Her research covers the diffusion and transfer of competition laws, and she also researches institutional design of competition authorities and the boundaries between competition law and human rights, sustainability, and inequality.
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Professor Gerard Hodgkinson, Alliance Manchester Business School
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.
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Dr Joseph Lee, Reader at UoM Law School
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.
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Professor Claire McGourlay, UoM Law School
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.
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Dr Pinar Oruc, Senior Lecturer at UoM Law School
Pinar joined The University of Manchester in 2021 as a Lecturer in Commercial Law. Pinar’s research focuses on intellectual property law, especially copyright, and its intersection with technology, cultural property law, art law and Indigenous rights. She is currently a co-director for the Centre for Law and Business.
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Professor Bijan Parsia, Department of Computer Science
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.
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Visiting research fellows
Tim is an Associate Professor of Law at Oklahoma City University School of Law and a Visiting Associate Professor at National Taiwan University College of Law.
His research, teaching and scholarship focuses on Intellectual Property (IP), Antitrust and Competition Law, Law and Technology - in particular AI, Blockchain and Web 3.0, Administrative Law, Legislation and Regulation, and Sports and Entertainment Law.
He has close to two decades of experience practicing IP, Antitrust & Entertainment Law at top AmLaw100 firms such as Greenberg Traurig, Foley Lardner & Seyfarth Shaw.
Tim has served as a judicial law clerk for active federal judges in the US District Courts for the Eastern District of Texas, District of New Jersey, Northern District of California, Western District of Oklahoma and Eastern District of Michigan, including the Honourable Jameson Lee, the senior-most Administrative Patent Judge at the PTAB.
He worked for more than five-and-a half years at the US Patent and Trademark Office as a Business Methods Patent Examiner, and he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society (the country’s oldest IP journal that is frequently cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justices in IP cases). View his SSRN page.
Tim holds a JD from UC Law San Francisco (formerly University of California Hastings), an LLM from UC Berkeley School of Law, an MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an LLB from the University of London, and currently pursuing a PhD in interdisciplinary Engineering at Texas A&M.
Danqing Hu is an independent researcher on money and credit, with special interest in CBDC and payment innovations.
Danqing had worked for Ant Group (parent company of Alipay) for 8 years, leading stable coin projects and cross-border real-time payment innovations. He used to be head of product of Ant Blockchain, with more than two dozen blockchain-related patents granted.
Prior to joining Ant Group, Danqing had also led self-assessment of PFMI at Shanghai Clearing House in its capacity of CSD and CCP, which is a subsidiary of the People’s Bank of China. Danqing received Ph.D. in economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. in economics from Boston College, and B.S. in physics from Fudan University.
Eduard has been involved in digital money, cryptography and IT security for the past 35 years and has been analysing the design and implementation cryptocurrencies since their inception.
Eduard has been granted over 40 patents. The patents include one that lead to the development Java Card technology and one for a secure protocol for e-cash with anonymous offline payment.
In 2017 he received the annual smart card award from the Fraunhofer institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt.
His current projects include the design of a digital public-money infrastructure offering payments accessible to all with direct finality and free of fees.
Chastity formerly served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Financial Institutions, overseeing four offices and managing key areas such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, digital assets, consumer protections, and financial inclusion.
Before this, Chastity played a key in standing up the racial equity office, leading the digital transfer work. She also worked to shape the American Rescue Plan through her work on state and local fiscal recovery programs. She also served as a senior economic policy advisor to Representative Rashida Tlaib, leading legislative efforts on e-cash, stablecoins, and digital assets, and advancing initiatives in financial reform, racial equity, and inclusion.
Earlier in her career, Chastity worked with former Representative and HUD Secretary, Marcia Fudge, and gained experience at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her contributions to economic policy and digital cash were highlighted in a 2020 Forbes article, with a more recent feature in 2024 focusing on her work in digital payments, stablecoin policy, and inclusion.
Chastity holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from South Carolina State University.
Aleksandar is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Economics at New York University Shanghai, specialising in international financial flows and the global monetary architecture.
His research examines the political economy of international monetary relations, with a particular focus on China’s global financial strategy, domestic debt management, and the structural dynamics of international financial markets. He has explored the role of financial institutions, monetary hierarchies, and the evolving challenges to the U.S. dollar dominance.
His work engages with interdisciplinary perspectives, combining empirical analysis with institutional and historical approaches to global finance.
Dr Guoshu Yang recently completed his PhD in Law from The University of Manchester in 2024.
Prior to his academic career, Guoshu worked as a financial analyst, specialising in trading across the US, UK, and China stock markets.
His current research focuses on the historical comparative analysis of war and constitution, with a specific emphasis on Taiwan and China, and the role of offshore finance in contemporary unconventional warfare.
Simon Youel is Head of Policy & Advocacy at Positive Money, a non-profit research and advocacy organisation working towards a money and banking system that supports a fairer, more democratic and sustainable economy.
Simon is a member of the Bank of England and HM Treasury’s Engagement Forum for the digital pound, and the Bank of England’s working group on offline payments.
Simon’s policy work has explored the benefits of publicly-issued digital money, and he is a leading commentator on the future of money and banking in the UK media.
Management team
Business Engagement Manager
Rachel is Business Engagement Manager for the Faculty of Humanities, within the University of Manchester’s specialist Business Engagement & Knowledge Exchange (BEKE) team; she is also the Business Engagement Lead across the University for FinTech, LegalTech, and Digital Trust & Security themes.
The BEKE function provides a mechanism for improved information flow between universities and the wider-world, facilitating collaboration with business partners, to inform research and increase economic & societal impacts.
Rachel founded the Law & Technology Initiative (along with the Associate Dean for Business Engagement) and has been the driving force and operational lead behind it from the outset.
Rachel plans and hosts the annual MLaTI Conference and leads on coordination of a wider LawTech community for Greater Manchester, including delivering numerous Global Legal Hackathon events and speaking on LawTech projects at conferences nationally.