Visiting Research Fellows
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. T
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.