People

The Centre brings together its Director, doctoral scholars, and members from the Ulster University Business School Finance Group. Members are listed by their alignment to the Centre’s research strands.

Director

Professor Barry Quinn

Director; Professor of Finance and Financial Technology

Chartered Statistician. Applied econometrics and causal inference with trustworthy machine learning, for markets, risk, and evidence that can stand over operational and regulatory scrutiny.

Strands: financial crime and AML; corporate innovation and financial disclosure; investment decisions and portfolio construction.

Profile

Doctoral scholars (commencing September 2026)

Three fully funded scholarships establish the doctoral programme. Two are Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships with Belfast financial-technology firms, Napier AI and Pytilia; the third is a Department for the Economy studentship.

Ali Reza Keivanimehr

PhD scholar — Agentic AI for Financial Crime Detection

Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Pytilia. Supervised by Professor Barry Quinn and Professor Jun Liu.

Strand: financial crime and anti-money-laundering systems.

Kabir Olawore

PhD scholar — Generative AI for AML Investigator Training

Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Napier AI. Supervised by Professor Barry Quinn, Professor Yaxin Bi and Pamela McCloskey.

Strand: financial crime and anti-money-laundering systems.

Robert Mulligan

PhD scholar — Innovation Quality Signals from Patent Text

Department for the Economy studentship. Supervised by Professor Barry Quinn, Dr Bryan Gardiner and Dr Stephen Billington.

Strand: corporate innovation and financial disclosure.

Members

Members from the Finance Group appear here as they join, tagged by the Centre strands they align to. If you are a colleague who would like to be included, see Join the Centre.