Our people

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.