Our People
Co-Directors
Professor of Law
Email:Jackie.Hodgson@warwick.ac.uk
Jackie is Professor of Law. She established the Criminal Justice Centre and the cross-faculty Centre for Operational Police Research, which she co-directs.
Jackie has researched and written in the area of European & comparative criminal justice. She has conducted large scale qualitative empirical studies in Britain and France, as well multi-jurisdiction comparative studies in Europe, feeding directly into EU legislative reforms around procedural safeguards for both adult and child suspects. She has also worked on the investigation and prosecution of crime in France, the provision of effective defence rights, miscarriages of justice and terrorism investigations. She is currently researching how working through arts and culture can be a more effective way to understand the experiences of young people and policing; and the treatment of female detainees in police custody.
She has contributed to UK policy reform through her research for the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, her evidence to Select Committees and to the Scottish Criminal Justice review carried out by Lord Carloway. At the EU level she has contributed to legislative reform through Brussels Policy Briefings, and as an expert for EU impact assessments on Directives for the legal aid, pre-trial detention, presumption of innocence, and the impact of Brexit on police co-operation. She has been commissioned as an expert witness in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, as well as European Arrest Warrant cases and Scottish and Canadian extradition cases.
Professor of Psychology
Email: K.A.Wade@warwick.ac.uk
Kimberley is a Professor in Psychology. She is the Executive Director of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC), and an Associate Editor at the journal Legal & Criminological Psychology. From 2014-2018, Kim served as the Deputy Director of COPR. She now serves as a Co-Director alongside Jackie Hodgson.
Kim is a cognitive psychologist. Her main area of expertise is human memory. She is particularly interested in autobiographical and episodic memory distortions, and the application of memory research to legal contexts. For instance, her research has focused on topics such as eyewitness testimony, interviewing witnesses, digital and fabricated evidence, constructing and administering lineups, and interrogations and confessions.
Members
Mariam Abdelnabi is a second-year MRes/PhD student at Warwick Business School. Her research explores how individuals’ financial footprints can impact decision-making in risky contexts, with a specific focus on gambling behaviour and its associated harms. In addition to her main research Mariam is working on a project which explores how variations in officer-level practices could help explain and improve victims' satisfaction.
Mariam has also worked with various behavioural consultancies in the global south, evaluating the impact of behavioural-informed policies in the region.
Politics and International Studies
Email: r.j.aldrich@warwick.ac.uk
Richard Aldrich is Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick. His book include The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers(2016)and GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency (2019). In 2016, he began a Leverhulme major research fellowship investigating the changing nature of secrecy. His articles have appeared in International Affairs,Foreign Affairs,Foreign Policy and Studies in Intelligence. He is an adviser to various parts of the UK government and assisted the German Parliament with its enquiry into the Snowden affair. He is currently involved with H2020 and ERC projects in Europe.
Email: A.Aliverti@warwick.ac.uk
Ana's research looks at the intersections between criminal law and criminal justice, on the one hand, and border regimes, on the other, and explores the impact of such intertwining on the national criminal justice institutions and on those subject to the resulting set of controls. She is also interested in criminal law theory, regulatory criminal law, human rights law, and criminology.
Email: Aura.Bamber@warwick.ac.uk
Aura is an Inner Temple Scholar and researcher with an interest in both the study and practice of law. Her doctoral research, "Are detainees in Scotland getting a fair trial? An interdisciplinary and empirical evaluation of the treatment of suspects in police custody in Scotland” is funded by the ESRC DTP. Supervised by Professor Jackie Hodgson (Law) and Professor Kim Wade (Psychology) in collaboration with JUSTICE, the research explores the legal, cultural and behavioural factors that affect the exercise and effectiveness of procedural safeguards for suspects in police custody, and the impact this has on police treatment of the suspect
Politics and International Studies
Email: J.Coaffee@warwick.ac.uk
Jon is an international expert in counter-terrorism and urban security. His work has been supported by a significant number of UK Research Council grants and EU funding on designing safer urban spaces, resilient design for counter-terrorism, social media adoption amongst law enforcement, and the role of law and regulation in post-terrorist responses.
Email: m.draca@warwick.ac.uk
Mirko Draca is a Professor in the Economics Department at Warwick University. He has studied the relationship between police and crime, as well as a major study of the 'returns to crime'. The returns to crime research established how property crime moves systematically with the value of goods. Current research interests include: the economics of 'darknet' drug markets and the causes of the UK violent 'crime wave' of the late 2010s. Mirko is Director of the CAGE research centre in the Economics Department and also does empirical research on a range of topics related to labour markets, innovations and political economy.
Department of Computer Science
Email:Nathan.Griffiths@warwick.ac.uk
Nathan Griffiths is a Professor of Computer Science. He is currently a Turing Fellow and was previously a Royal Society Industry Fellow. His research area is multi-agent systems, with a particular focus on trust and reputation, human-AI systems, social network analysis, and machine learning. Current projects include assessing trust and reputation using provenance records, machine learning for intelligent systems, norm emergence, and influence manipulation in social networks.
Professor in Politics and International Studies
Email: C.Heath-Kelly@warwick.ac.uk
Professor Heath-Kelly currently leads the 5 year 'Neoliberal Terror' project in the PAIS department, and is concurrently a co-investigator on the Norwegian Research Council's 'RIPPLES' project. While RIPPLES explores the retrospective legal and social measures used to restore equilibrium after a terrorist attack, Neoliberal Terror is interested in the anticipatory counterterrorism measures which have come to occupy space in welfare state systems.
Professor Heath-Kelly's publications are mostly open-access and can be found here.
Anita Khadka is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick.
Her research area involves Responsible AI investigating AI Resilience and Assurance. She has contributed to several EPSRC-funded projects, including those on Robotic Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear (RAIN) and FAIRSPACE investigating the impact of adversarial attacks and developing defensive strategies to mitigate them. She focuses her research mainly on critical infrastructure including Healthcare, and Nuclear where the consequences of Adversarial Attacks can be high.
Currently, she is exploring AI assurances in Digital Healthcare as a part of a large EU project ‘Insafedare’. She is also exploring the emerging security and governance challenges of advanced AI technologies such as frontier AI, to develop a set of early policy recommendations that help these transformative technologies are developed and deployed responsibly and ethically, this project fund is awarded by the University of Warwick Policy Support Fund 2024-25.
Email: r.lewis.9@warwick.ac.uk
Rachel is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Law. Her PhD was supervised in Applied Linguistics and Sociology at Warwick University, and her research focuses broadly on bordering practices, anxiety, and punitivity in the contemporary UK. She has a particular interest in the social life of policy - the discursive realisation of policy in everyday practice.
She is currently researching issues around policing in the UK, with a particular focus on police-community relations and the potentials afforded by arts and culture as a medium for effecting change in police practice.
Email: CM@warwick.ac.uk
Professor Carsten Maple is the Principal Investigator of the NCSC-EPSRC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at the University of Warwick and Professor of Cyber Systems Engineering in WMG. His research has attracted millions of pounds in funding and has been widely reported through the media. He is a co-investigator of the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Carsten has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers, is co-author of the UK Security Breach Investigations Report 2010, supported by the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Police Central e-crime Unit, and co-author of Cyberstalking in the UK, 2012, a report supported by the Crown Prosecution Service and Network for Surviving Stalking. He has given evidence to government committees on issues of anonymity and child safety online. Additionally he has advised executive and non-executive directors of public sector organisations and multibillion pound private organisations.
Professor Maple is Immediate Past Chair of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing in the UK, a member of the Zenzic Strategic Advisory Board, a member of the IoTSF Executive Steering Board, an executive committee member of the EPSRC RAS Network and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee, the ENISA CarSEC expert group, the Interpol Car Cybercrime Expert group and Europol European Cybercrime Centre.
Hannah is an Assistant Professor at the department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Her research interests include the relationships between policing, vulnerability and victimhood in the UK as well as young people's experiences of policing and the wider criminal justice system in England and Wales.
Hannah is a qualitative researcher, focusing on ethnography, semi-structured interviewing, arts-based methods, and participatory methods.
Email: c.mills.3@warwick.ac.uk
Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Law School with an expertise in normative philosophy. Much of his work concerns the nature and value of choice, including questions about personal autonomy and manipulation. Before joining Warwick, he was a Research Fellow in Ethics and Law at University College London where his research focussed on the ethics of choice architecture and behavioural law, and he contributed to teaching in both the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Brain Sciences.
Email: Tim.Mullett@wbs.ac.uk
Tim is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. His research investigates the psychological and neural processes involved in decision making. He uses a range of research methods including cognitive modelling, neuroimaging, big-data analysis and behavioural experiments.
Email: V.Munro@warwick.ac.uk
Vanessa is a Professor at Warwick Law School, which she joined in 2016. She is currently working with the Scottish Government to evaluate jury decision making, but her previous work has focused on issues such as law and gender and sexual violence. She has also completed an ESRC-funded project with REFUGE that explored domestic abuse and suicidality.
Sharda Ramdewor Murria
School of Law
Email: s.ramdewor@warwick.ac.uk
Sharda is a PhD student researching the use of Body Worn Video (BWV) in stop and search. Her research explores two key questions: what can BWV tell us about existing stop and search practice, and how can BWV itself affect the use of stop and search. Her research explores themes of accountability, surveillance, procedural justice, deterrence, race and police-community relations.
Email: Gabriele.Pergola.1@warwick.ac.uk
Gabriele Pergola is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, specialising in Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research spans various NLP areas, including natural language understanding, social data analytics, hate speech and sexism analysis, topic and event extraction, and clinical text mining. His work bridges academia, law enforcement, and government agencies, applying NLP techniques to tackle real-world challenges in public safety and policy analysis.
Pergola collaborates closely with law enforcement agencies and the Forensics Capability Network (FCN) to develop advanced NLP frameworks that enhance investigative capabilities. His projects include designing novel AI systems to detect messages related to violence against women and girls (VAWG) and analyzing drug-related communications and networks, designing and delivering cutting-edge NLP technology to professionals working on the front lines of public safety.
In addition to his work with forensic analysis, he advises both law enforcement and the UK government as part of the Academic Advisory Group on Generative AI Detection R&D. He also collaborates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) on projects that leverage NLP for policy automation, as well as on separate projects analysing digital immigration systems to provide insights into migrant experiences and support informed policy-making.
Rebecca Plimmer
Department of Psychology
Email: Rebecca.Plimmer@warwick.ac.uk
I am a Psychology PhD student researching individual differences and the role of psychological factors such as dark personality traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and psychological entitlement), moral values and same-sex competition on police attitudes towards violence (i.e., support for use of force, violent ideation, rape myths and negative racial attitudes) and decision making (i.e., use of force acceptability, reporting, seriousness).
Email: Ross.Ritchie@wbs.ac.uk
Ross joined WBS following a career in the energy sector. Ross holds an MBA (Warwick) and PhD (Warwick). In his research Ross has investigated how risk is understood and managed in operations, across a variety of contexts. Studies have included the Energy Industry, Intelligence and Police Services. Ross has a specific interest in police custody and police decision-making.
Computer Science
Email: v.f.sanchez-silva@warwick.ac.uk
Victor Sanchez is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK, where he leads the Signal and Information Processing (SIP) Lab. His research focuses on the application of signal processing and AI in image and video analysis, biometrics, and security. He has been a member of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is currently the Chair of the Technical Committee on Computational Forensics under the auspices of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). Some of his research has been funded by the Defence and Security Accelerator of the UK’s Home Office, to develop AI technologies to analyse CCTV videos for the detection of abnormal events.
Research Fellow - Politics and International Studies
Email: sadi.shanaah@warwick.ac.uk
Dr Shanaah is a Research Fellow on 'Neoliberal Terror: The Radicalisation of Social Policy in Europe' in the PAIS department.
He has primary responsibility for its quantitative work package, including the development of a composite index for P/CVE policies (preventing and countering violent extremism) in Western countries. Dr Shanaah's research focus is on the phenomenon of political violence. He is interested in the factors, mechanisms and processes that could lead to or prevent political violence, from the perspective of social psychology and social movement approaches. In his doctoral research, he examined the willingness of British Muslims to engage in actions against Islamist extremism and the factors that facilitate or hinder such engagement.
Politics and International Studies
Email: T.E.Sorell@warwick.ac.uk
Tom Sorell is Professor of Politics and Philosophy in PAIS and Dept. of Philosophy, and Head of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research GroupLink opens in a new window in PAIS. He was an RCUK Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow (2013-2016), working on ethics in counter-terrorism and the fight against organised crime. Before that he led the Warwick work onSURVEILLELink opens in a new window, a counter-terrorism, human rights, and surveillance project. He was Co-I of the ESRC-funded Assuming Online Identities project (2014-2017), and more recently of the EPSRC-funded DAPM projectLink opens in a new window (on mass-market fraud), and headed the Warwick contribution to the FP7 SIIP project on speech identification technology. He leads the Warwick work on PERICLESLink opens in a new window, a Horizon 2020 project on anti- radicalization, and was Co-I on the H2020 Media4sec project on policing and social media. He is Vice-Chairman of the Home Office Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group, a member of the Data Ethics Committee of the West Midlands Police CommissionerLink opens in a new window, and Chair of the General Ethics Committee of West Midlands Police. He has published recent peer-reviewed articles on preparatory offences, problems in the conceptualisation of organised crime, digilantism, victimisation in romance scamming fraud, Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act (2003), definitions of serious crime, stalking as an extreme privacy violation, big data ethics and policing, and the use of electronic monitoring for offenders. He is co-editor (with John Guelke and Kat Hadjimatheou) of Security Ethics (Routledge, 2018).
Email: Neil.Stewart@wbs.ac.uk
Neil Stewart is a Professor of Behavioural Science in the Behavioural Science Group at Warwick Business School. Neil's work uses laboratory and field experiments, big data, and mathematical modelling to understand why people behave the way they do and how to influence their behaviour. Neil's recent work explored causal peer effects in police misconduct, where one officer's misconduct allegation causes an increase in the future misconduct allegations of their peers.
Email: Simon.Tawfic@warwick.ac.uk
Simon is a specialist in ethnographic research. He is particularly experienced in multi-sited and institutional fieldwork. Simon’s most recent research, as part of the Vulnerable State project, is an ethnography of frontline policing. More specifically, it investigates the mainstreaming of public protection policing departments and attempts to address modern slavery. He studies the moral meanings that officers attach to ‘policing’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘care’ and their pursuits of rapport with potential victims. He takes a comparative approach within and beyond police forces, analysing the different styles of different investigative teams and multiagency partners, in order to understand the evolving role of policing in the contemporary moment.
Simon's doctoral thesis asks what it means to work in the business of ending homelessness in England. Offering an ethnographic account of aid ‘at home’, it focuses on a regularly neglected aspect of scholarly coverage of homelessness: the moral labour, disputes, tragedies and contradictions negotiated everyday by frontline workers.
His work seeks to 'repatriate' critical scholarship about humanitarianism and international development to help better understand the state of governance in the UK. More broadly, he is interested in the lifeworlds and moral emotions of frontline workers and their institutions, especially the ambivalent and contradictory feelings that arise from enacting care in institutional settings.
Paul Teare
Department Politics & International Studies
Email: Paul.Teare@warwick.ac.uk
Paul is a first year PhD student. His research question is unveiling the lifeworld of Metropolitan Police Special Branch/ Counter Terrorism Command officers. In this work he seeks to explore how these officers perceive, shape, and define their professional environment in the realm of semi-secret, covert policing.
Email: L.Walasek@warwick.ac.uk
Lukasz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology with expertise in behavioural science. His main area of research concerns human judgment and decision making, with a particular interest in valuation, risky choice, nudging, and big data research.
Email: Zoha.Waseem@warwick.ac.uk
Zoha Waseem is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also a co-coordinator of the international platform, the Urban Violence Research Network. Zoha conducts interdisciplinary research on policing, state violence, crime and politics. She is broadly interested in the intersections of law and violence, the politics of policing and insecurity, the pluralisation of security provision, militarisation, migration, and informality in the urban global South. She employs ethnographic and qualitative methods in her research, drawing conceptually upon postcolonial, critical, and southern perspectives upon security, policing, and criminal justice.
Email: M.A.Williams.1@warwick.ac.uk
Professor Mark Williams is Leader of the Centre for imaging, Metrology, and Additive Technology (CiMAT) at WMG. His role involves the delivery of Metrology, Additive Manufacturing and Visualisation research projects across a wide range of industries. Prof Williams has managed a diverse portfolio of Research and Development projects totalling over £50M funded by EPSRC, AHRC, InnovateUK, HVM Catapult and EU within the Automotive, Aerospace, Healthcare, Defence and Law Enforcement sectors.