Team

James Shires is the Co-Director of both the European Cyber Conflict Research Incubator (ECCRI CIC) and the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative (ECCRI). He is also a Fellow with The Hague Program on International Cyber Security. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Cyber Policy at Chatham House, and before that an Assistant Professor in Cybersecurity Governance at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, University of Leiden.

He has written widely on issues of cybersecurity and international politics, including cybersecurity expertise, digital authoritarianism, spyware regulation, and hack-and-leak operations. He is the author of The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Cyberspace and Instability (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). A full list of publications is available at jamesshires.com

Max Smeets is the Co-Director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative and Incubator, and serves as Managing Editor of Binding Hook. He also holds research positions at ETH Zurich, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Max is the author of Ransom War: How Cyber Crime Became a Threat to National Security and No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber Force.

Max received a BA in Economics, Politics and Statistics from University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University and an MPhil (Brasenose College) and DPhil (St. John’s College) in International Relations from the University of Oxford.

Anni Adamson is the Administrative Officer at the European Cyber Conflict Research Incubator (ECCRI CIC) and the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative (ECCRI).

In her previous positions, Anni dedicated her time to event planning and project management, marketing and social media management. She was the Day-to-Day Manager of the Estonian band Trad.Attack!, Marketing Manager at Estonia’s leading Postimees Media House and Head of Marketing at Postimees Publishing House. She also coordinated events and led the inspiration programme at Treski Music and Inspiration Centre and contributed to various other projects in the Estonian cultural sphere.

Anni holds a degree in psychology and communication from University of Tartu, Estonia.

YuYing Mak is Project Officer at the European Cyber Conflict Research Incubator. She holds a Bachelor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences from Macquarie University, Australia, and in her previous roles, has been a content developer for Ernst & Young supporting youth financial literacy, a technical business analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia – one of the largest banks in Australia, private tutor teaching the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program Computer Science and Design Technology, and a ceramics teacher.

Magdalene Karalis is the Content Manager of ECCRI CIC. She is also a research associate at Chatham House. Her research primarily focuses on how open-source investigations impact the online environment during conflicts and on tracking global Russian influence operations. She has worked with the Center for Information Resilience and Protection Group International, monitoring Russian influence operations worldwide and examining disinformation on social media with a special focus on elections.

Magdalene has served as a rapporteur at Wilton Park, has experience with government contracts, and is trained in designing and implementing strategic simulations.

She is fluent in five languages. Her work has been published by Chatham House, The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs and The Intelligence and National Security Journal.

She holds a Joint Honours BA in Political Science and Russian from McGill University and an MSc in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics, where her dissertation focused on frozen conflicts within the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

Alina Meyer is an independent consultant with over 22 years of experience in the area of human rights, gender, diversity and social inclusion.  A former Canadian diplomat and development practitioner, she has consulted for clients including the World Bank, the Green Climate Fund the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, UK DFID (FCDO), German GIZ, Australian DFAT, the UN, and a variety of NGOs such as Care, Girl Effect, Nutrition International, Oxfam, and Planned Parenthood. Prior to consulting, she worked for Global Affairs Canada as the Senior Policy Advisor on Women’s Rights and as a Gender Equality Specialist. She holds an BA from McGill University, a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.  She speaks English, French and Spanish. She has lived in 12 countries, including Japan, Ethiopia and Fiji, and worked extensively across Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Americas.

Olga Kyryliuk has a PhD in international law and over 10 years of experience in the field of digital rights and internet governance. Currently working as Technical Advisor on Internet Governance and Digital Rights at ‎Internews spearheading the digital rights portfolio of the largest internet freedom project spinning around 40 countries across the world. She is also serving on the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) and chairing the South Eastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance (SEEDIG), regional IGF covering 18 countries. In 2021-2023, she served as a Europe Representative at ICANN NCUC Executive Committee. Olga provides consultancy and expert support to Freedom House, Council of Europe and a range of international companies working worldwide. She also dedicated four years to work in leading humanitarian organizations, including International Committee of the Red Cross and Danish Refugee Council, dealing with the provision of legal support to conflict-affected populations.

Maryam Mehrnezhad is a Reader at Information Security Group (ISG), Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL), UK, joined in September 2022. Before that, she was a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Secure and Resilient Systems (SRS) group, Newcastle University, UK, and a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2022. Between 2016 and 2022, she was a tenured trackResearch Fellow (Research Assistant), at Newcastle University, UK.

Maryam has a PhD in Computing Science (2013-16, funded by Newcastle University, UK), an MSc in Information Security (2008-11), and a BSc in Computer Engineering (2004-08), both at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Iran. She has studied at the Iranian National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents High School (SAMPAD, 2000-04). 

Dr Mando Rachovitsa is an Associate Professor in Human Rights Law. She is the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Law Centre. Mando joined the University of Nottingham in 2023. Prior to that she was an Assistant Professor of International Law at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2016-2023) and an Assistant Professor of International Law at Qatar University, Qatar (2013-2016). Mando’s expertise lies in the areas of human rights law and technology law. She researches the intersection between human rights law and technology, including digital human rights, and human rights-based design for cybersecurity standards and algorithmic systems. She has written on the human rights assessment of the use of new technologies, including encryption, and digital ID systems, and how human rights law may inform the design and implementation of Internet standards. She has also published on how international law-like standards are created and used to assess the legality and legitimacy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) work in the domain names’ space.

Professor Carr is the Director of the UK-wide Research Institute in Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS) which looks at the human and organizational factors of cybersecurity. She is also the Director of the Digital Technologies Policy Lab which supports policy making to adapt to the pace of change in society’s integration of digital technologies. Her research focuses on the implications of emerging technology for national and global security, international order and global governance.Professor Carr has published on cyber norms, multi-stakeholder Internet governance, the future of the insurance sector in the IoT, cybersecurity and international law, and the public/private partnership in national cybersecurity strategies. Her book US Power and the Internet in International Relations is published by Palgrave MacMillan. Professor Carr was the Co-lead on the Standards, Governance and Policy stream of the UK’s £24M PETRAS research hub on the cyber security of the Internet of Things. She is now the lead on the Economics and Law lens of the new PETRAS National Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity of the IoT. Professor Carr is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Council on the IoT. She is also the Deputy Director of a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity at UCL which focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of these problems.

Innar Liiv is Associate Professor of Data Science at Tallinn University of Technology and a Research Associate at Oxford University’s Centre for Technology and Global Affairs. He also belongs to the Future of Public e-Governance expert group at the Foresight Centre at the Parliament of Estonia. He was previously a Cyber Studies Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2016-2017), a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (2015), and a Postdoctoral Visiting Researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2009). His research interests include e-government and data science, social network analysis, computational social science, information visualization, and big data technology transfer to industrial and governmental applications. He is currently exploring an interdisciplinary research question, ‘How to use data science to improve governments innovatively and successfully?’

Prof. Andrew Martin undertakes research and teaching in the area of Systems Security, in the University of Oxford. He has spent the last two decades leading many aspects of security innovation in the University’s teaching and research, including the creation of the MSc in Software and Systems Security and the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security.  He also leads Oxford’s EPSRC/NCSC-recognised Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research.

The main focus of his research is in hardware-software co-design for security.  This is expressed in developing applications for trusted computing and trusted execution environments in large-scale distributed systems, particularly cloud computing, mobile devices, and the internet of things. He has published extensively in this area, hosting several related international events in Oxford and speaking on the subject all over the world.

Andrew wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject ‘Machine-Assisted Theorem Proving for Software Engineering’, in the early 1990s. He then worked as a Research Fellow in the Software Verification Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. Returning to the UK, he was briefly a lecturer at the University of Southampton, before returning to Oxford to take up his present post in 1999.

Dr Martin is a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, an Adjunct Professor at Griffith University in Australia, and a Trustee of Bletchley Park.   He is a member of the Executive and Editorial Board of CyBOK, the Guide to the Body of Knowledge in Cyber Security.  He is presently the supervisor for seven doctoral students, and holds several research grants.  Within the Department of Computer Science he is Director of Academic Environment; he is also a member of the Central University Research Ethics Committee and chair of the Joint Information Security Advisory Group within the University.

Jason R.C. Nurse is a Reader in Cyber Security at the University of Kent and Public Engagement Lead at Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security (KirCCS), part of the Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS). He is also a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a Visiting Fellow in Defence and Security at Cranfield University, a SPRITE+ Expert Fellow, and a professional member of various associations relating to cyber security research and practice.

Prior to joining Kent in 2018, Dr Nurse was a Senior Researcher in Cyber Security at the University of Oxford and before that, a Research Fellow in Psychology at the University of Warwick. For his research into the interdisciplinary aspects of security, privacy and trust, Jason was nominated as a Rising Star within the UK’s EPSRC RISE Awards Campaign. Specifically, his research concentrates on investigating interdisciplinary approaches to enhance and maintain cyber security for organisations, individuals and governments. This often focuses on human individuals and users and how they interact with technologies.

Roxana Radu is an Associate Professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy and a Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College. Her research focuses on the governance of technology and internet-related policymaking. She is the author of the monograph ‘Negotiating Internet Governance’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), inspired by her work with the diplomatic community in Geneva, Switzerland. She often advises governments and international organisations on digital governance issues and currently serves on the Advisory Group of the EU Cybersecurity Agency. Since January 2023, she is the elected Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet). Roxana holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute and an MA (honours) in Political Science from the Central European University.

Akin Unver is an associate professor of International Relations at Ozyegin University, specializing in conflict research, computational methods and information warfare. He is a fellow of Carnegie Endowment’s Digital Democracy Network and serves as a member of TikTok’s MENA-T Security Advisory Council. Previously he served as a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute. He is the Istanbul organizer of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) and the founder of the Istanbul Twitter Developers’ Community. Currently, Dr. Unver leads the HorizonEurope project, titled “Detecting and Countering Information Suppression from a Transnational Perspective” (DECONSPIRATOR), which brings 14 European universities and research institutes together to produce empirical and methodological advances in combating foreign information manipulation in the EU.

Marc Dumont is based in South Africa, and has over 10 years of experience building, maintaining, and fixing WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores. He has extensive experience with Elementor, Divi, WPBakery and other WordPress Page Builders.

Matija Lujic attained his LL.B. and LL.M. in Maastricht, and his M.A. in political science in Belgrade and Graz. He has published for the Dutch legal journal Asiel- en Migrantenrecht, as well as for Dutch newspapers such as Volkskrant and Parool. He is currently studying Directing at the University of Television and Film in Munich, and works, among other things, for the German public broadcaster ARD.