Team

Dr Carrie Pemberton Ford has been the innovator of several social impact initiatives, principally in the arena of counter trafficking, migration, securing safe freedom of movement, and enabling understanding and integration across cultures particularly when in diasporic momentum (www.chaste.org, www.ccarht.org, www.ibixtranslate.com). Carrie has brought together a team from the Institute for the Future, to enable the delivery of an intervention around secure qualification for movement as part of the next essential steps to be taken for the global community to be brought into a place of sustainable public health safety. A Women’s National Commissioner under the Blair Government in the UK, Carrie has been instrumental in raising the challenges of BAME deeper inclusion in public office and decision making in public policy over the last two decades of NGO advocacy and consultancy into UK Policing in her role as a Senior Assessor for the UK College of Policing.

Prof. Soulla Louca who has been nominated by LATTICE80 as one of the top 100 women in Fintech for 2019. She is one of the early adopter academics who got involved in blockchain technologies in 2014, when she assumed the responsibility of the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Nicosia. The Blockchain Initiative now the Institute For the Future has designed and developed the first MSc worldwide in Digital Currency, presenting itself as the technology for publishing academic certificates on the blockchain (http://block.co/).

Professor Louca has been a pioneer in developing and organizing tech events including the Decentralized series (www.decentralized.com) as well as undertaking pioneering research into the applicability of blockchain for several public sector implementations. For seven years, she headed the Domain Committee for ICT for the European program COST (www.cost.eu) representing the interests of the 36 Member States which constituted the initiative. Her principal tasks were the evaluation and monitoring of the ICT Actions, bringing together more than 3000 researchers in areas of e-Society, Information Security, Networks, and Nanotechnologies. Furthermore, she was responsible for identifying trends, boosting pioneering research activities and helping define strategies in science and technology through the organization and participation of strategic initiatives for promoting the ICT policy in Europe and beyond, for the betterment and new digital experiences of European citizens.

Even though her research interests for many years have focused on information society (socio-economic aspects of ICT, e-learning, social integration, and digital divide), due to her COST activities she has expanded her knowledge and the significance of Blockchain implementation work over a wide range of areas including personalized medicine, women in ICT, and the significance of open access for the underpinning of democratic societies. She is a professor in the newly founded Department of Digital Innovation as well as a Director at the Institute for the Future at the University of Nicosia and lead for the digitization stream of Health Matters Technology Ltd.

Klitos Christodoulou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Digital Innovation at the University of Nicosia (UNIC). He is also the Research Manager at the Institute For the Future (IFF) and the Scientific Lab leader of the Distributed Ledgers Research Centre (DLRC) at IFF (https://www.unic.ac.cy/iff/dlrc/). A Centre that aims towards fostering academic research on blockchains. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and an M.Sc. in Advanced Computer Science – with specialisation in Advanced Applications, both from the University of Manchester, UK.

A Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. Krisots’ research interests span both Data Management challenges; with a focus on Machine Learning techniques, and Distributed Ledger Technologies; with an emphasis on Blockchain ledgers.

Klitos teaches Blockchain Applications and Blockchain Programming in the UNIC’s MSc in Digital Currency programme. He is a member of the ISO/TC 307 Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies group. Klitos is also an active member for developing the Cyprus National Strategy for Blockchain. He represents Cyprus as an invited expert at the European Blockchain Partnership. Klitos is currently Principal Investigator of the Ripple grant at UNIC and participates as a research member to a number of EU funded projects e.g., EUNOMIA (Horizon 2020) and DLT4ALL (Erasmus+) projects.