Our People

Oliver Butler

Oliver is interested in public automated decision-making, the digitisation of public services, and data processing by public authorities (in particular concerning transparency and the reuse of public datasets). His background is in administrative law, privacy law and data protection law. His core focus is on how technology is changing public power and how we should think about traditional public law and individual rights in the context of digital constitutionalism.

Nicholas Gervassis

Nicholas' main research interests cover areas of Information Technology, Internet regulation, Intellectual Property (with particular focus on digital copyright and uses of online content), cybersecurity and Digital Cultures. His legal research platform traverses a number of disciplinary domains, like Advanced Technologies and AI, Cybernetics & Human-Computer Interaction, Cultural Anthropology and Critical Theory.

Natalie Leesakul

Natalie draws on her background in law, business, and computer science to explore the adoption enablers, challenges, and implications of emerging technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human-robot collaboration. She works towards developing innovative strategies for the sustainable and responsible implementation of technology into organisations and society.

Aislinn Bergin

Aislinn's research is at the intersection of emerging technologies and mental health, involving a programme of work which is aiming to bring together diverse groups of experts by experience, policymakers, industry, researchers, and other relevant parties to empower more responsible and trustworthy innovation in the development, evaluation, and implementation of emerging technologies in mental health. She is a co-investigator on the RAi Keystone addressing the socio-technical limitations of Large Language Models in medical and social computing, leading on Responsible Research and Innovation and the scoping of requirements criteria through engagement with diverse stakeholders. She also leads the Horizon Adoption of Wellbeing Technologies Toolkit project which aims to support charities and voluntary sector organisation in navigating the complex landscape of regulations, standards, and safety when making decisions about the wellbeing technologies they want to adopt.

Favour Borokini

Favour is interested in the impact of subsisting and emerging technologies, especially AI, on society. Focusing on women and Global South perspectives on these issues, she is interested in centring how non-Western cultures and communities perceive, interact with and domesticate technology through the lens of legal pluralism and jurisgenesis and the conflicts that emerge as a result, in private, professional and public life.
Her past and current research explores these issues through qualitative, participatory research methods including workshops, interviews and arts-based methods.
Favour is also interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the social impact of technology, especially through the philosophy of technology.

Kathryn Brookfield

Kathryn researches the ways digital technologies are used by perpetrators of domestic abuse to cause harm to their intimate partners, and how the 'digital turn' in service provision is impacting on those under digital surveillance by their intimate partner. She is interested in regulation of technology and prosecution of tech related crimes in the context of violence against women and girls.

Jeremie Clos

Dr Jeremie Clos' research revolves around applied interdisciplinary research involving AI and how it interacts with various professional disciplines. Some of his past projects focused on large language models in legal services, digital twins for healthcare, and privacy-preserving corpus linguistics. His interests centre around the topics of human-centred AI, interpretability, digital humanities and health.

Ellie Colegate

Ellie researches online safety and content moderation from both legal and sociotechnical perspectives, with a focus on the UK context. She specialises in the Online Safety Act 2023, examining how digital policies actually work in practice and their impact on different user communities, including work with young people and their everyday experiences of harmful content online. Her work bridges the gap between regulatory intentions and real-world outcomes, aiming to inform more effective policy-making in our rapidly changing digital landscape.

Estelle Derclaye

Estelle is Professor of Intellectual Property Law. She is interested in digital aspects of IP, especially copyright protection of databases and software, but also online infringement, artificial intelligence and digital designs, using both doctrinal and empirical approaches in her research.

Steven Furnell

Steven Furnell is Professor of Cyber Security in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include security management and culture, usability of security and privacy, and cybercrime. He has authored over 420 papers in refereed international journals and conference proceedings, as well as various books, book chapters, and industry reports. Steve is the UK representative to Technical Committee 11 (security and privacy) within the International Federation for Information Processing, and a board member of the Chartered Institute of Information Security, and a member of the Steering Group for the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK) and the Careers and Learning Working Group within the UK Cyber Security Council.

Rebecca Hall 

Rebecca's research interests concern the fast emergence of new technologies in the defence industry which is fundamentally changing the nature of armed conflict both now, and threatens to change it even more into the future. As part of her research, she engages with those in the academic, military and technology industry space to better understand the practical applications and implications of and for International Humanitarian Law, as well as having a way of creating new policy ideas which are achievable and sustainable.
The technologies that she focuses on are mainly remote and autonomous systems, including remotely piloted air systems, autonomous weapon platforms and AI-decision making tools.

Kyle Harrington

Kyle Harrington has a background in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, with a PhD in Human Factors Engineering. Kyle has worked on a range of research projects at involving people interacting with complex socio-technical systems. Kyle teaches on several modules relating to how people interact with technologies; including Cognitive Ergonomics, and Advanced Methods in Human Factors and HCI. He founded the academic network "Human Rights in the Digital Age", bringing together staff and students, working in research areas at the intersection of digital technologies, individuals, and society, with shared interests in the legal, ethical, political, and social issues which arise from the development and implementation of digital technologies.

Hannah Heilbuth

Hannah's PhD is focused on exploring experiences of consumer harm in video games and the extent to which existing UK consumer law protects gamers from this harm. She is using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines doctrinal legal analysis with empirical, qualitative, Human-computer interaction (HCI) methods. Empirical HCI research methods will be used to explore players' experiences of harm in online multiplayer games and how game mechanics and other design decisions in video games as well as factors in the surrounding gaming ecosystem impact players' consumer decision making. These findings will be used to evaluate whether UK consumer law is protecting the decision-making autonomy of consumers from unfair interference by video game companies and to consider how the efficacy of regulation might be improved going forward.

Richard Hyde

Richard Hyde is Professor of Law, Regulation and Governance at the School of Law. He has research interests across tort, contract, and consumer law and the regulation of emerging technologies. He is currently undertaking research into how technology can improve the disclosure of information to consumers when purchasing complex financial products and into the ways that consumer law functions when applied in new technological spaces. He has previously built a VR game to explore compliance with food hygiene law, a card game to help apply ethical norms to new technologies and explored how consumers read contracts using eye-trackers.

Tobias Lunn

Tobias' research is rooted in digital humanism and generally preoccupied with how technology impacts human connection. He explores questions such as whether technology enhances or inhibits Free Speech and democracy as well as the experience of social relations and self-determination, before proposing how the law can intersect with these findings. His research leans towards the abstract and conceptual - how to rethink and reimagine the law, based on insights and conclusions drawn from non-legal disciplines.

 Anjela Mikhaylova

Anjela Mikhaylova is a PhD candidate whose research explores the ethical and social impacts of everyday surveillance technologies, with a focus on smart doorbells. Her work examines how these devices erode social fabric, reshape privacy expectations, and contribute to the normalisation of surveillance in residential spaces. Drawing on theories such as panopticism and surveillance capitalism, Anjela’s research highlights the need for stronger legal and policy frameworks to address emerging forms of decentralised surveillance. Her interdisciplinary approach supports the LTRC’s mission to rethink governance and regulation in response to advancing technologies.

Marc Moore

Marc is interested in how evolving AI technologies can impact organisational decision-making, especially on matters requiring the exercise of value judgment and empathy. He is also interested in decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and the capacity for "self-driving" businesses.

Violet Nguyen

Violet's research focuses on advancing human-centred design tools, with a particular emphasis on personas, to support evidence-based policymaking in the transport sector. She is also investigating methods for fair and responsible data manipulation to help policymakers better understand and represent the diverse needs of different community groups in their decision-making processes.

Anna-maria Piskopani

Anna-Maria Piskopani is a human rights scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of freedom of expression—particularly the right to science and the arts—and privacy, data protection, and personality rights. Her work examines how these rights interact across diverse contexts, including fictional literature, social media platforms, and emerging AI technologies.Over the past four years, she has worked as a Research Fellow in IT Law at the Horizon Institute of Digital Research, University of Nottingham. In this role, she has contributed to a range of multidisciplinary projects addressing the legal and ethical dimensions of digital innovation. Her portfolio includes investigations into the use of telepresence robots in museum settings, content moderation practices on social media and encrypted platforms, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, and digital mental health technologies.
Currently, Anna-Maria leads the project “Gendered Exclusion and Wellbeing on the Internet”, part of the Horizon-funded Welfare Campaign. This initiative explores the impact of misogynistic, anti-feminist, and sexist discourse on online participation and individual wellbeing, with the aim of informing inclusive digital policy and practice.

Mando Rachovitsa

Mando's expertise lies in the area of human rights law and technology law currently focusing on human rights harms and risks posed by algorithmic systems, including advanced AI systems. She is also currently working on human rights law issues regarding AI research.

Judith Skillen

Judith researches in the areas of the law of obligations, remedies, and privacy. Her PhD thesis (University of Bristol) was entitled, 'Damages and Misuse of Private Information'.

Bernd Stahl

Bernd Carsten Stahl is Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham where he leads the Responsible Digital Futures group (https://www.responsible-digital-futures.org/). His interests cover philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. This includes ethical questions of current and emerging ICTs, critical approaches to information systems and issues related to responsible research and innovation.

Paul Torremans

Paul studies the protection of technology through intellectual property and particularly how such protection operates at the cross-border level. AI and biotechnology in particular attract his attention.

Helena Webb

Helena is a socio-technical researcher focusing on research to understand the relationships between computing and society. She is interested in how technology intersects with society, policy and the law, plus how different forms of governance can uphold societal values and positively shape our experiences of innovation. She has particular interests in the application of AI across various sectors and the future of the Internet and social media.

Joanna Wisniowska

Joanna's expertise covers intellectual property law, with particular focus on patent law. Her research interests lie in the field of biotechnological and pharmaceutical inventions, as well as current regulatory and ethical issues in the field of biotechnology and modern medicine, as well as sustainable technologies.