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Biography
Ellie Colegate is an Assistant Professor within the School of Law.
Ellie joint the School of Law in October 2025 as a Teaching Associate in Law and Technology before being appointed as an Assistant Professor in January 2026. She holds an first class LLB and masters degree from Canterbury Christ Church University, where she has previously worked as a Lecturer in Law. She completed her UKRI-ESPRC funded PhD at the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, University of Nottingham in 2025.
Expertise Summary
Ellie's specialism lies primarily within online platform governance and regulation. Her expertise focuses on the Online Safety Act 2023, the regulation of harmful user-generated content, and the experiences of children as active participants online on social media platforms.
She also has expertise conducting multidisciplinary research, socio-legal empirical research, working with young people as participants, and utilising methods that result in the co-production of knowledge.
Ellie has wider interests in user-experiences of online environments and platforms, how age-appropriate experiences can be achieved online and the use of age assurance technologies as part of this, and the translation of offline legal principles and theories to the online world. She has previously researched the impact of internet shutdowns on users exercising their rights to freedom of expression and the rights of online activist groups in relation to modern surveillance practices. She is a member of the Law and Technology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham and a active contributor to the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association.
Ellie would be interested in supervising dissertation and research students in her area of expertise and wider interests.
Teaching Summary
Ellie teaches on the Foundations of Tort, Online Regulation and E-Commerce, and Cybercrime, Cybersecurity and Surveillance.
Research Summary
Ellie is currently researching the contemporary content moderation practices on social media platforms, with a particular focus on the Online Safety Act 2023 and obligations owed to children within… read more
Current Research
Ellie is currently researching the contemporary content moderation practices on social media platforms, with a particular focus on the Online Safety Act 2023 and obligations owed to children within the Act. This stems from her PhD thesis which explored how the Act has impacted children in their everyday, mundane interactions with potentially harmful user-generated content on social media platforms. This project produced both findings in relation to the Act as an isolated intervention as well as insights into the experiences of children with harmful content and 'online harms' more widely. She is currently disseminating these findings via journals, conferences, and other academic publications.
She is also researching how policies around the use and purpose of age assurance technologies can be standardised across the sector, and the impact the Online Safety Act 2023 has had on the operations of traditional e-commerce platforms.
Past Research
Ellie has previously conducted research at the intersection of technology and human rights. Exploring whether online activist groups could be afforded group protections under human rights frameworks in light of modern surveillance practices, and the impact of internet shutdowns on individual freedoms.