Meet our speakers - International Crime Science Conference 2024

Sander is Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He has won numerous awards for his research on human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

He co-developed the award-winning fake news game, Bad News and regularly advises governments, public health authorities, and social media companies on how to combat the spread of misinformation. He is ranked among the top 1% of highly cited social scientists worldwide and has published over 150 research papers.

His book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity won the 2024 Harvard Goldsmith Prize, the best book prize from the British Psychological Society and was named a Financial Times, Waterstones, and Nature Book of the Year. Before joining Cambridge, he held academic positions at Princeton, Yale, and the LSE.

Sandra has been at Cifas since 2000 and has a wealth of experience in fraud data analytics and a deep and expansive understanding of data sharing for the purposes of fraud prevention. She leads on Cifas’ research and development, ensuring that the Cifas community is equipped to handle the ever-evolving fraud threat. She previously oversaw the insight function, delivering fraud-related research and intelligence, and was the author of Cifas’ annual report Fraudscape, which analyses current fraud trends in the UK. She has also overseen a team specialising in Government and law enforcement relationships, supporting the police in investigating fraud and financial crime. Sandra co-authored the OIX Guide to Fraud Controls for Digital Identity ecosystems.

Prof Lewis Griffin is a Professor of Computer Science and Departmental Tutor at UCL. Lewis leads the research group COMPASS - Computational Security Science. His research is in AI & Security, Computer Vision and Colour Science.

Professor Martin Gill is a criminologist and Director of Perpetuity Research which started life as a spin out company from the University of Leicester. He holds honorary/visiting Chairs at the Universities of Leicester and London.

Martin has been actively involved in a range of studies relating to different aspects of security, private policing and business crime on topics including: organised crime and fraud; why offenders offend; the (in)effectiveness of different security measures; and the scope of security management. Martin has been extensively involved with evaluation research and with the offender’s perspective looking at how they target certain people and premises and aim to circumvent security measures.

He has published 15 books including the third edition of the 'Handbook' of Security' which was published in 2022. He is the organiser and Chair of the Security Thought Leadership webinar series. In 2022 he was recognised by Security Magazine as one of the ‘Most Influential People in Security’ and also received the Mervyn David Award from the ASIS UK Chapter ‘for his significant contribution to the security profession’.

Martin is the Founder of the Outstanding Security Performance Awards (the OSPAs and Cyber OSPAs); the Tackling Economic Crime Awards (the TECAs); and the Security and Safety Entrepreneurial Awards (The SSEAs). 

Tara began her career at HSBC, creating a multi-award-winning internal website to educate staff on digital trends and new technologies. She then led product initiatives at several crypto startups focused on borrowing, lending, and cold storage trading. Tara then held various roles at Elliptic, notably building the Delivery team, spearheading educational efforts on web3 topics for institutions, governments, and regulators, and using her crypto and industry knowledge for innovative product development. She is now the Head of Product at Twinstake, a leading institutional staking provider which offers staking based innovations coupled with a strong focus on compliance, optimised performance and enhanced data. Additionally, Tara is a prolific writer and thought leader, having created a crypto game, an advent calendar, and authored a book on Bitcoin. She is a sought-after speaker at various international conferences, discussing a broad range of topics across the tech spectrum and bringing her c9 years of experience in the industry and contagious passion for the crypto ecosystem. 

Victoria Baines is Professor of Information Technology at Gresham College, London’s oldest higher education institution, where she is responsible for delivering public lectures that demystify world-changing technologies. Her areas of research include digital ethics, cybersecurity, and the misuse of emerging technologies. She also provides research expertise to several international organisations. For several years, Victoria was Facebook’s Trust & Safety Manager for EMEA. Prior to this, she led the Strategy team at the European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), where she was responsible for the EU’s cyber threat analysis and horizon scanning. Victoria chairs the Information Security Panel of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and is Deputy Chair of the Lord Mayor’s Initiative on Ethical AI.

Detective Inspector Andy Marsh has been a police officer for 27 years, with a background in complex investigations such as fraud and money laundering and has now been working in the Child Sexual Abuse arena for the last 15 years.

His investigative experience spans Force, Regional, National and International operations.  He now leads the national Online CSA Covert Intelligence Team. His team report on new and emerging offender behaviours and, for the last 18 months, have been monitoring offender misuse of new technologies, such as generative AI and Extended Reality. This experience not only assists law enforcement but helps advise government policy.  

The speed of adoption of new technologies by CSA offenders is startling and through the work of his team in countering child sexual abuse, Andy has come to be a police adviser to different crime types; whose suspects also seek to misuse these modern technologies.

Dr. Antonis Papasavva is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Security and Crime Science of UCL. Prior to that, he completed his PhD research at the Department of Computer Science at UCL in Data Science and Discourse Analysis. Antonis' research currently focuses on the evolution and detection of emerging online fraud and the techniques that scammers use to convince potential victims. During his PhD, Antonis conducted research on the characterisation and detection of far-right, extremist, and conspiratory fringe communities in alternative and mainstream social networks. 

Ardi Janjeva is a Research Associate at the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS).

His research interests are divided into three main areas: artificial intelligence innovation and disruption, intelligence tradecraft and investigatory powers, and emerging technology, political economy and strategy.

He has worked closely with national and international partners across government, academia, civil society and the private sector on these topics, producing research which has been cited in academic journals and mainstream media outlets such as the Financial Times and the BBC. 

Dr. Bettina Rottweiler is a research fellow at University College London. Her research examines the underlying risk and protective factors for different violent extremist outcomes for use in research and practice, with a focus on the effects of conspiracy beliefs and their relevance to violent extremist risk. She was co-Principal Investigator of the “Conspiracy Theories and Violent Extremism” project funded by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). She is currently co-leading a project funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and NCITE focusing on the functional relationship between conspiracy beliefs and violent extremism.

Dr Bina Bhardwa is a senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently working on a Dawes Trust-funded study on Tackling Online Fraud in partnership with the Police Foundation and Crest Advisory. Previously, Bina has worked on a Dawes Trust-funded study exploring the nature and diversity of organised crime groups involved in fraud and a follow-up study, on the role and facilitation of organised fraud and money laundering by professional enablers. She has co-authored a book on Organised Crime Groups involved in Fraud. 

Her research interests include fraud, online fraud, organised crime and money laundering, drugs policy, policing, and markets. Bina was awarded a PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University. She has a Masters’ in Criminology and Criminal Justice from King's College London and a BA in Sociology from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Dr Daniel Jolley is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Nottingham.

He leads a research programme that explores the intriguing realm of conspiracy theory psychology, seeking to uncover the reasons behind their widespread appeal.

His work has also focused on understanding how and when conspiracy beliefs could be associated with violent extremism. His work has been funded by bodies such as The Leverhulme Trust and The British Academy.

Passionate about science communication, he has appeared on TV (e.g., BBC One Show), radio (e.g., BBC Radio Scotland), and print (e.g., New York Times), and has given many invited public talks (e.g., New Scientist Live).

Ema is currently a Doctoral Student in the Center for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity where her research focuses on the investigation of Cybercrime as a Service.

She holds an undergraduate degree in Security and Crime Science from UCL and a master’s degree in Security and Resilience: Science and Technology from Imperial College London.

Her research interests are very diverse, but she is most interested in emerging (technology) threats and their impact from a socio-technical perspective as well as the evolution of the more traditional crimes to today’s world. Ema has been a research intern at the Police Foundation for the past 9 months where she was mostly involved in the online fraud project.

Professor Hervé Borrion (UCL Jill Dando Institute, Deputy Head of Department) is a crime scientist with an interest in systemic and ecological approaches to security risk management. His research focuses on computational modelling and simulation of crime and situational crime prevention. He has conducted and supervised academic research covering a wide range of issues, including cybercrime and the Metaverse. He has worked with organisations including the Home Office, Environment Agency, Defra, Historic England and Interpol. Hervé is the director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber-Physical Risk.

Janice is a criminologist and the lead researcher for economic crime at Perpetuity Research.

With more than 20 years’ prior experience as an accountant, mainly in the public sector, she has expertise in the areas of governance, risk management, security and audit. She is particularly interested in economic crime, crime in the workplace and fraudster behaviour. She has extensively researched these areas both here and in Australia, with a focus on offender accounts of fraudsters. She has particular experience in interviewing within prisons and has undertaken over fifty interviews with incarcerated white-collar offenders.

At Perpetuity, she manages and delivers on a range of projects including research on tackling fraud in local authorities; whether the reporting of fraud in the UK should be compulsory; fraud in the Middle East; the problems of using digital evidence; and improving the police response to victims of fraud and scams. Janice has published a number of articles and co-authored chapters in books on workplace crime and the motives of white-collar criminals. Her own book entitled ‘White-Collar Crime: Accounts of Offending Behaviour’ was published in 2011.

Kacper Gradon, Ph.D., D.Sc. is an Associate Professor in Cybersecurity (Warsaw University of Technology), Honorary Associate Professor at University College London Department of Security and Crime Science and a Visiting Fulbright Professor and Faculty Affiliate at University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the World Health Organization Global Infodemic Manager, Fulbright Senior Award Scholar and the recipient of the Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship.

His area of expertise is disinformation, hybrid and information warfare, GAI-applications in security, human-centric dimensions of cybersecurity and Future Crimes. He has been frequent consultant of law enforcement agencies and intelligence institutions worldwide. He presented at over 200 conferences on all continents and is a triple TED(x) speaker. He lectured at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), University of Southern California, University of Greenwich, Memorial University of Newfoundland and at law-enforcement academies, such as the Portland Police Department Training Division and Indian National Police Academy in Hyderabad.

Kärt is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity at University College London (UCL). Her research investigates autonomous hybrid attack operations that strategically coordinate cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against cyber-physical-social systems. She also focuses on developing autonomous defensive countermeasures that can detect and respond to these attacks effectively. Kärt holds a master's degree in Cybersecurity from Tallinn University of Technology. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a cybersecurity analyst at CybExer Technologies and Swedbank AB in Estonia.

Kimberly is a PhD researcher at University College London and a Principal Technology Adviser at the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Her recent work on how humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes was featured in international news outlets including the BBC, New Scientist, and The Guardian. Kimberly holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from the London School of Economics and a master’s degree in data science and machine learning from University College London. Her research interests include machine learning, security science, and AI policy.

Lorenzo is Associate Professor at the Department of Security and Crime Science at UCL and Deputy Director of the UCL Dawes Centre for Future Crime. He is also Visiting Professor at Nebrija University Madrid.

Lorenzo's research focuses on the legal frameworks developed to counter criminal threats emerging from social and technological changes, such as globalisation, climate change or digital technologies. His approach mixes traditional doctrinal analysis with socio-legal and criminological analysis of the law.

Before joining UCL, Lorenzo was the Associate Head for Research of Coventry Law School and a Sessional Lecturer in Law at Imperial College London.

Dr. Manja Nikolovska is a Research Fellow at the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at UCL.

Her research focuses on how technological and social change can affect the future of crime. Her background is in Information Systems Science and Criminal law. Recent work includes making meaning out of social media data for future fraud prevention; examining cyber security behaviours and routine activities during disruption, deriving insights from policing during social disruptions in anticipating future threats and the evolution of cyber grooming of children.

Working closely with law enforcement and practitioners in the field drives her work with grounding that in practice, (cyber)crime prevention is “what works” to reduce it. Therefore, she attempts to approach future crime anticipation and prevention with theoretical and conceptual shapeshifting among research practices and fields that answer to crime reduction viability in practice.

Manon is a Senior Manager who has a range of experience managing projects for Crest Advisory, Public Health Wales and the Wales Centre for Public Policy, covering diverse topics such as health and housing, poverty and social exclusion and children of prisoners. Manon is experienced in both primary and secondary large scale qualitative research, using such skills to produce a range of types of research findings and outputs.   

Mark Button is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime at the University of Portsmouth.  He was founder and Director of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies 2010-2022.

Mark has written extensively on counter fraud, cyber-fraud and private policing issues, publishing many articles, chapters and completing eleven books, including Economic Crime: From Conception to Response; Private Policing and Cyber Frauds, Scams and their Victims.

Some of the most significant research projects include projects for EPSRC, ESRC, Home Office, National Fraud Authority, Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure, Cifas and Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office to name some. Mark has also worked on the Government’s Annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey and the pilot Economic Crime Survey. Mark completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Exeter, his Masters at the University of Warwick and his Doctorate at the London School of Economics.  

Head of serious crime research at the Police Foundation, an independent think tank engaged in applied research to develop the evidence on crime and policing, with a view to the improvement of policing for the benefit of the public. Research has been focused to build our understanding of offenders, offending, victims, and related crime control strategies in the context of serious and organised crime, with a particular focus on fraud and cybercrime, including assessments of structures, policies and practices in law enforcement and wider public sector.

Current projects include a programme of research funded by the Dawes Trust that is looking to develop an evidence-based understanding of the online fraud problem in the UK, an NIHR-funded project examining the health impact or fraud, and a project for the UN to understand organised crime in the context of fraud. Other current research includes an examination of the meaning, application, and value of ‘disruption’ as a mode of crime control for serious and organised crime. A recent PhD graduate from the University of Portsmouth.

Dr. Nilufer Tuptuk is a lecturer in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Her research interests focus on the cyber security of cyber-physical systems (e.g. Internet of Things, Industrial Control Systems, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles), and cybercrime such as online fraud. Her current work focuses on developing AI-based models to detect and prevent cybersecurity threats and cybercrime, and on exploring vulnerabilities in AI.

Sarah is the Chief Information Security Officer and Deputy Chief Information Officer at University College London, a top ten global university with world class academics, students, industry links, external partners and alumni. Sarah has been a transformational technology and security leader for many years having moved accidentally into the world of IT in the year 2000 from a former career in law. Starting her technical years working at the University of Oxford she took responsibility for many IT transformations including data centre, networks and information security practice.

After leaving the University of Oxford, Sarah took her first CISO role in a global enterprise, supporting teams in many countries, including Spain, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia. She also worked as a leadership partner for Gartner, again supporting many global CISO’s across Europe. Now working back in Higher Education, Sarah has built up a transformational security practice and has been working to combine practical security excellence while also supporting the universities computer science and cyber academic research and student learning. Sarah recently completed an MBA and has a passion for continued learning, development and innovation.

Sharad is a Product Analyst at Stop Scams UK and a third-year Ph.D. candidate at University College London (UCL) researching online financial fraud. He has investigated cryptocurrency-based online investment scams, such as High-Yield Investment Programs (HYIPs) and Rugpulls. Currently, his research is in the intricate realm of SMS phishing. He has extensive cybersecurity and research experience, having worked for 3 years at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and 1 year at the University of Bristol with the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity. 

Sarah Ying Zheng's PhD shed light on why people fall for online scams and developed nonvel approaches to protect people from phishing e-mail scams.

She uses her multidisciplinary background in psychology, neuroscience and applied machine learning from several years in industry to drive innovation in usable security research. Her work has been published in international conferences and academic journals.

Sophie is Director of Research Advisory and has joined Crest Advisory from her role as Head of Home Affairs at the Behavioural Insights Team. Before that, Sophie worked as a Political Advisor to Rt Hon Lord Falconer, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice.

At Crest, Sophie leads our in-house think tank, Crest Insights. Sophie has a wealth of experience leading on projects in the home affairs and justice areas, working with government departments, police forces and senior officials in the criminal justice sector and utilising her knowledge of home affairs to influence policy-making. Sophie is leading Crest’s Dawes Trust-funded project on online fraud and has given evidence gathered from the project to the Home Affairs Select Committee as part of their inquiry into fraud.
 

Ingolf is a Lecturer in Security and Crime Science in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. He currently leads UCL's part of the 3-year ESPRC project ‘Protecting public facing professionals and their dependents online (3PO)’. His research focuses on human-centred security and privacy. Ingolf’s work is fundamentally driven by the understanding that security and privacy are never the primary task but should instead be seen as an enabler for productivity and society more generally. Ingolf works with people and organisations to build and study systems and policies that are both secure and productive.

Juliana is an engineer and Lecturer at the Security and Crime Science Department at UCL. She is researching the distribution of harm across the cocaine trade in Colombia. Examples of previous projects include simulating coca crops, cocaine production and interventions; modelling the jurisdiction for peace of Colombia to estimate workflows and costs; and identifying future crimes enabled by the metaverse.

Kate Bowers is the current Head of Department of the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. Kate has worked in the field of crime science for almost 30 years, with research interests focusing on the use of quantitative methods and data analytics in crime analysis and crime prevention. Her most recent interests are predictive policing, big data approaches and the use of innovative data and data science approaches in understanding crime trends.

Lorenzo Cavallaro is a Full Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), where he leads the Systems Security Research Lab (https://s2lab.cs.ucl.ac.uk). He grew up on pizza, spaghetti, and Phrack, and soon developed a passion for underground and academic research. Lorenzo's research vision is to enhance the effectiveness of machine learning for systems security in adversarial settings. He works with his team to investigate the interplay between program analysis abstractions, representations, and ML models, and their crucial role in creating Trustworthy AI for Systems Security.  

Lorenzo publishes at and sits on the Program Committee of top-tier conferences in computer security and ML and received the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2022. He is Associate Editor of ACM TOPS, IEEE TDSC, and Computer & Security. Lorenzo holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Milan and held positions at King's College London, Royal Holloway University of London, Vrije Universitat Amsterdam, UC Santa Barbara, and Stony Brook University. In addition to his love for food, Lorenzo finds his Flow in science, music, and family.

Noemie Bouhana is Professor of Crime Science and Counter Extremism at UCL, where she co-leads the Counter-Terrorism Research Group.

Her work is concerned with the processes involved in the emergence of extremist social ecologies in complex social systems and the mechanisms which underpin individual vulnerability to extremism. She has directed the €2.9M EU FP7 PRIME project, an international consortium of six European universities working on the prevention and mitigation of lone actor radicalisation and attack behaviour, and the $1M project "The Social Ecology of Radicalisation", sponsored by the US DoD Minerva Initiative.

Currently Noemie is funded by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) to develop an environmental extremism risk analysis framework for use by Prevent practitioners. Previous work has been supported by DStl, OSCT, the MoD Counter-Terrorism Science and Technology Centre, EPSRC, and the US National Institute of Justice.

As a researcher in the UK Home Office, Paul Ekblom led diverse crime prevention projects. His final responsibilities focused on horizon-scanning; advising on design against crime; and developing crime prevention knowledge management.  He then spent 10 years as Professor (now Emeritus) at the University of the Arts London Design Against Crime Research Centre, focusing on products, places and services. He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Security and Crime Science, UCL and the Applied Criminology and Policing Centre, University of Huddersfield.

Paul has worked with the Australian Institute of Criminology, Government of Abu Dhabi, Council of Europe, EU Crime Prevention Network, European Commission, European Forum on Urban Security, Europol, and Cepol. Current work covers design, developing knowledge frameworks and toolkits for crime prevention and counter-terrorism, and horizon-scanning for crime/security futures (including on climate change).  

Shane Johnson is a Professor of Future Crime. He directs the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at UCL and co-directs the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity at UCL.

He has published over 150 articles, has a Chief Constable's commendation for his work on what works to reduce crime, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory boards of the UK Home Office and the Max Planck Institute.