Academic staff

Emilios Avgouleas holds the International Banking Law and Finance Chair at the University of Edinburgh and is the founding director of the Edinburgh LLM in International Banking Law and Finance.  Emilios is a leading international expert on public policy and financial reform, banking theory, banking and capital markets regulation, law and finance, and global economic governance.  His current technology-related research focuses on derivatives and securities markets' infrastructure.  With Professor Aggelos Kiayias he specifically develops models for the use of blockchain technology to lower transaction costs, enhance investor control over their investments and optimise risk management in financial markets and examine the impact of such innovations on financial market governance and systemic risk distribution. 

Aris Filos-Ratsikas is a Lecturer in Algorithms and Complexity at the School of Informatics. His research interests include algorithmic game theory and mechanism design, computational social choice theory, and fair division. In the context of blockchain technologies, he is interested in the algorithmic principles and incentive structures that underline and dictate blockchain systems and their applications. 

Claudia Pagliari is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School. She directs the interdisciplinary research group and co-leads the NHS Digital Academy in collaboration with the Global Health Innovations Unit at Imperial College London. Claudia is a World Health Organization Expert in Digital Health, a European Commission Technical Consultant in Digital Disease Surveillance and Advisor in Digital Ethics to the Scottish Government. 

Her interdisciplinary research intersects with that of the Blockchain research group in a number of ways, most recently on a collaborative study of Contact Tracing protocols during Covid19, and previously on blockchain for accountability in global philanthropy, food safety, human resources management and biomedical research. She also studies emerging uses and challenges of BigData, AI and robots in healthcare. As part of her multi-sectoral work in digital ethics she is currently examining the social and policy implications of related innovations, including FinTech, cyber-policing  and NFT art. Her main interest is in how technologies like Blockchain can support useful, safe, accountable and ethical practices, and the accountability of the technologies themselves.