Sima Farokhnejad

Research Fellow in Slavery and War (Forecasting and Data Science)

Email: Sima.Farokhnejad@nottingham.ac.uk

Sima Farokhnejad is a Rights Lab Research Fellow in Slavery and War with the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War, a collaborative centre between the University of Nottingham and King's College London. Her focus in the Leverhulme Centre is on forecasting and data science: network-based approaches to understanding and predicting the behaviour of complex systems. Her work combines network science analysis, topological data analysis, graph neural networks, and AI-based regression models to capture heterogeneous patterns, forecast the dynamics of event emergence, and support data-driven decision-making and interventions.

She has an undergraduate and graduate background in Physics from SBU in Tehran, where she studied modelling real-world phenomena. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Exeter, focusing on modelling disease spread under uncertain conditions. During her doctoral research, she applied network science and adapted vector-field methods to predict the direction and dynamics of infection spread.