ES Fellowship Programme

Tomaso Aste

UCL

Tomaso Aste is a professor of complexity science at UCL, where he is also co-founder and Scientific Director of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies (UCL CBT), head of the Financial Computing and Analytics Group, and vice director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Financial Computing & Analytics.

Kathy Yuan

LSE

Professor Yuan is Head of Finance at LSE and an MIT Economics Ph.D. graduate who formerly worked at J. P. Morgan's Emerging Markets Trading Desk. Her research delves into macro-finance and asset pricing, focusing on liquidity in markets with information and friction. She has explored crisis propagation in international finance and the impact of benchmark securities on market liquidity. Currently, she investigates liquidity and stability in financial institutions, including DeFi, the effects of digital payment technologies, and theories of (digital) money and public liquidity. Yuan, a member of FMG and CEPR, received the Houblon-Norman Fellowship and contributes to policy research for central banks and financial regulators.

John Augustine

IIT-Madras

John Augustine is an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, where he founded the Blockchain Innovation Centre and the Cryptography, Cybersecurity, and Distributed Trust group. He previously held roles at the Tata Research Development and Design Centre and at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Guy S. Liu

Peking University

Guy S. Liu is a Professor and Director of the Peking University HSBC Business School (PKU PHBS). He was also previously Head of Department at Brunel University and holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford.

Fahad Saleh

Florida University

Professor Saleh is a leading authority on the economic design of blockchains, contributing to the development of both blockchain consensus protocols and business applications. His work, published in top scholarly journals, has earned him a place among the most widely cited blockchain researchers globally. He serves on the editorial boards of Management Science and the World Scientific Annual Review of Fintech and is a founding member of the Crypto and Blockchain Economic Research (CBER) Forum. His academic background includes a PhD in Finance from NYU's Stern School of Business and degrees in Operations Research Engineering from Columbia and Cornell University.

Carsten Sørensen

LSE

Carsten Sørensen is an Associate Professor in Digital Innovation at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he is also the founder of the mobility@lse research unit. He is furthermore a Senior Editor of the Information Systems Journal, as well as an Associate Editor for Journal of the AIS and the e-Service Journal.

Agostino Capponi

Columbia University

Agostino Capponi, an Associate Professor at Columbia University's IEOR Department, specialises in financial technology, market microstructure, systemic risk, and economic networks. His work has received funding from NSF, DARPA, DOE, IBM, GRI, Ripple, and Ethereum, earning accolades like the 2018 NSF CAREER award and a JP Morgan AI Research Faculty award. Agostino is a fellow of the crypto and blockchain economics research forum, an academic fellow of Alibaba's Luohan academy, and holds editorial roles in several journals, including Management Science, Mathematics and Financial Economics, and Operations Research Letters. He's also a former Chair of the SIAG/FME Activity Group, the INFORMS Finance Section, and the founding director of Columbia's Center for Digital Finance and Technology.

Victoria Thompson

HSBC / Orora

Victoria Thompson is a FinTech lawyer and Founder CEO of Orora, a company dedicated to sustainable finance and impact banking technology. Previously, she was Head of Digital Legal for HSBC UK and EU, Global Group Head of Innovation Advisory at Barclays Bank, and Group Head of Technology at DBS. Victoria also served as a strategic advisory counsel at Ashurst, working with clients like Goldman Sachs on their Digital Assets Management Platform. Her experience includes roles at Hogan Lovells and DLA Piper, advising clients such as Standard Chartered Bank and Mercedes' F1 team. Additionally, she has been a legal adviser to the UK government, Chair of the FinTech Whitechapel Think Tank, and a mentor to TechStars and Outlier Ventures startups. A guest lecturer at UCL, Victoria is recognized as a leading woman in blockchain and FinTech.

Jéfferson Augusto Colombo

Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV Sao Paolo)

Jéfferson Colombo is a lecturer in Finance at the São Paulo School of Economics, Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Brazil, where he teaches Corporate Finance and Cryptofinance. Currently, he's FGV’s focal point at the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI), leading educational, research, and innovation activities on DLTs and their applications. He also holds a PQ researcher fellowship (Bolsa de Produtividade em Pesquisa) granted by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). His current research focuses on understanding the heterogeneous behaviour among crypto investors, the socio-demographic and economic determinants of crypto adoption, and the causes and consequences of cryptocurrency-related corporate announcements.

Te Bao

Nanyang Technological University

Te Bao is an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He obtained his PhD from CeNDEF, University of Amsterdam. His main research interests are computational economics, behavioural finance, economics of blockchain, social media and experimental economics. He is currently an Associate Editor of Singapore Economic Review, and served as a Member of Advisory Council of the Society for Computational Economics from 2018 to 2021.

Amit Kapoor

Stanford University

Amit Kapoor, Ph.D., Honorary Chairman at the Institute for Competitiveness, India, and Lecturer at Stanford University, chairs the Social Progress Imperative & Shared Value Initiative in India. He's an affiliate faculty at Harvard Business School, teaching courses on Microeconomics of Competitiveness & Value-Based Health Care Delivery. Inducted into the Competitiveness Hall of Fame, Kapoor is also a Ruth Greene Memorial Award recipient. He authored bestsellers “Riding the Tiger” and “The Age of Awakening,” plus “Competitiveness Roadmap for India at 100” with Michael Porter and Christian Ketels. His upcoming book on India's Competitiveness is co-authored with Amitabh Kant.

Imran Bashir

JP Morgan

Imran Bashir holds an MSc in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London and brings a diverse technical background, including software development, solution architecture, and IT service management. He focuses on cutting-edge technologies such as Blockchain, IoT, and quantum computing. His book "Mastering Blockchain" is a recognised standard text on the subject, and his second book Blockchain Consensus" introduces classical, Blockchain, and Quantum Consensus Protocols. He is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has served in senior technical roles for various organisations worldwide.

Terence Tse

Terence Tse is a professor of finance at Hult International Business School and an affiliate professor at ESCP Business School, a co-founder and Executive Director of Nexus FrontierTech.He is a co-author of two international best sellers on Amazon. He has run seminars and workshops as well as given speeches on technology and digital transformation, megatrends, and topics in finance and economics.He obtained his doctoral degree from the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

Mark Esposito

Dr. Esposito is Co-Founder at Nexus FrontierTech, an AI scale-up venture. He is a Senior Advisor to the Ideation Center of Strategy& at PwC in Dubai and to the UC Berkeley SkyDeck incubator and previously inducted in Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent rising business thinkers in the world. He holds prestigious fellowships at UCL as a Policy Fellow, at University of Cambridge as a Senior Associate, and as Senior Fellow for the Digital Impact Alliance from the United Nations Foundation. Harvard Affiliate that is also a member of the World Economic Forum and Professor in several institutions.