Visiting Parliamentary Fellowship

David Freud’s first career was as a journalist, training in Cardiff on the Western Mail and then moving to the Financial Times, where he spent his last four years writing the Lex Column. In 1984 he began his second career, in the City, where he specialised in equity markets, company flotations and transport. His most dramatic deal was the flotation of Eurotunnel in the teeth of Black Monday. He ended up as Vice Chairman at UBS before retiring in 2003. Afterwards he wrote a book on the experience called Freud in the City.

A spectacular failure as a retiree, he took up a job as CEO of the Portland Trust, which worked on both sides of the Israel/Palestine divide. Here he designed the initiative to build Rawabi, the first planned city for Palestinians in modern times.

He also produced an independent report for the UK Labour Government on welfare to work in 2007, called Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity. This led to a job as Conservative Minister for Welfare Reform (2010-16), where he worked to reshape the British welfare system. In particular he was involved in creating and shaping Universal Credit, to break the poverty and welfare traps. He described the gruelling experience in another book: Clashing Agendas

He created the Grandmentors programme in 2009, working with the charity Volunteering Matters. This provides older mentors for children leaving care. He became President of Volunteering Matters in 2019.

Labour (Co-op) MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch

Thomas Elston is Associate Professor of Public Administration at the Blavatnik School of Government. He is the author of Understanding and Improving Public Management Reforms (Policy Press, 2024), and Co-Director of the London PhD Colloquium for Public Management.

Dr Elston’s research focuses on the organisation and management of public services, particularly in terms of performance, resilience, reform and democratic control. At the School, Thomas teaches classes on political science and public management, and conducts workshops for senior leaders on strategy, organisational learning and resilience.

Thomas also consults for governments in Europe and North America on issues related to inter-organisational collaboration, civil service performance and public sector reform.

Jonathan is ranked in Chambers and Partners 2024 in POCA, extradition and Inquests and Public Inquiries, and in the Legal 500 2024 in POCA and International Crime and Extradition. He has a wealth of experience handling unusual, sensitive or controversial matters, in the fields of asset recovery, mutual legal assistance, national security, human rights, confiscation, tax and duties, law enforcement, extradition, inquests and immigration, and wherever criminal law interfaces with public law. Before taking Silk, Jonathan was a grade 4 prosecutor and on the Attorney General’s Civil A Panel.

In May 2019, Jonathan Hall KC was appointed by the Home Secretary as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. As with previous Reviewers, this is a part-time role which Jonathan principally conducts from Chambers. As a result of this appointment, there are certain limits as to the instructions that Jonathan can accept – his clerks will be happy to discuss.

Marianna Spring is the BBC’s social media investigations correspondent and an award-winning journalist. She presents podcasts and documentaries investigating the real-world consequences of what’s unfolding on social media – disinformation, hate, algorithms – for BBC Radio 4, BBC Panorama and BBC Three. Her latest series include Marianna in Conspiracyland and Why Do You Hate Me. She is also one of the presenters of the BBC’s Americast podcast. She was been named Best Host at both the ARIAS and British Podcast Awards. Her first book Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland was published in 2024 by Atlantic.

Mitali Mukherjee is a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism. She was a Chevening fellow for the South Asia Journalism Fellowship 2020, a Raisina Asian Forum for Global Governance Young Fellow 2019 and a 2017 fellow of the Australia India Youth Dialogue. In 2020, she was nominated for the prestigious Red Ink Awards in India for two of her business stories.

Over the course of her journalistic career, Mitali has been Consulting Business Editor at The Wire and Mint. Prior to that she was Markets Editor at CNBC TV 18 and Prime Time Anchor at TV Today and Doordarshan. She has been a Fellow at The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) where she led Gender Initiatives for the organisation. Mitali has also co-founded two start-ups that focused on civil society and financial literacy.

She is a gold medallist in Television Journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) New Delhi, 2001 and a gold medallist, Political Science Hons., Delhi University, 2000. She is also a TEDx speaker.

Pauline Neville-Jones is a Conservative member of the House of Lords where she sits on the Science and Technology Committee.

She began work in the Diplomatic Service serving in, among other places, Washington, the European Commission, as Head of the Policy Planning staff, Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Bonn. She took part in the negotiations leading to German Unification and was the negotiator for the UK of the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia.

Subsequently she worked in the City and, as Chairman, prepared the government owned technology company, QinetiQ, for IPO. She designed the National Security Council which came into operation in 2010 and served as Minister of State for Security and Counterterrorism in the coalition government under Prime Minister Cameron. She is active in cyber security and resilience.

She has been a BBC Governor and a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She is an honorary fellow of Lady Margaret Hall Oxford and has honorary degrees from London, Lancaster and Open Universities. She is a Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, a Privy Councillor and a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

Lucas Kello is the Director of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, a University-wide initiative sponsored by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Nusrat Ghani is the Conservative MP for Sussex Weald. In 2015 Nusrat made history as the first female Muslim MP ever to be elected as a Conservative and remains a minority of one in her party.

In July 2024, Nusrat was elected Chairman of Ways and Means, becoming only the second woman to hold the post and the first person of colour to serve as Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. In this role, she chairs daily debates in the Chamber and holds senior responsibilities, including Chair of the Speaker’s AI Steering Group.

Nusrat migrated to the UK along with her family and not only is she the first female to attend University but she is also the first girl to attend school. Her mother and grandmother are illiterate as they were denied access to formal education.

As an MP, Nusrat has served on the Business, Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs Select Committees and as rapporteur for NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly Science and Technology Committee. She has led major inquiries into antisemitism, child sexual abuse, violent extremism and Uyghur forced labour, resulting in sanctions against her by both China and Russia—the only woman in Parliament to be sanctioned by two countries.

She became the first female Muslim Minister in 2018 and has since served in senior ministerial roles across transport, industry, economic security and foreign affairs, including as Minister of State for Europe at the FCDO.

Ignacio Cofone is Professor of Law and Regulation of AI, working at the Faculty of Law and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a governing body fellow of Reuben College. He is also an affiliated fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Quebec AI Institute. Before joining Oxford, he was the Canada Research Chair in AI Law and Data Governance at McGill University.

Ignacio’s research examines how law and regulation should respond to social and economic changes driven by AI; in particular how to govern harms produced by machine inferences. His recent book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy (CUP 2023), argues that AI requires restructuring privacy and data protection law based on duties of non-exploitation because basing these bodies of law on individual control has become ineffective. His current research projects examine how to prevent and remedy nonmaterial and relational AI harms, and on using comparative analysis to design regulatory frameworks that promote accountable AI. Updated details on his publications are available on SSRN and Google Scholar.

Ignacio has been appointed for visiting teaching and research positions at NYU School of Law, Paris Panthéon-Assas, University of St Gallen, Bar-Ilan University, Tilburg University, and Torcuato Di Tella University and advises governments, courts, and other organizations on applying and adapting law and regulation to AI—such as by working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on an overhaul of Canadian privacy law. He obtained doctorates from Yale Law School (JSD) and from Hamburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam (joint PhD, rer. pol.), as well as common law and civil law degrees. He is happy to supervise doctoral and postdoctoral candidates (who should apply directly through the graduate studies office without prior authorization), particularly from scholars with interdisciplinary or comparative law proposals related to the governance of inference-based harms.