I am a PhD researcher in Mathematics at the University of Sussex, working under the supervision of Dr. Chris Hadjichrysanthou. My research focuses on statistical and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, with particular interests in Bayesian inference, within-host viral dynamics, and computational methods for analysing complex biological systems.

Asad Ali Abbasi has a PhD in the International Development from the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Asad holds an undergrad degree in Economics from Queen Mary University of London; a master’s degree in development economics from City University London and a master’s degree in political economy of Late Development from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Asad’s thesis, which is based on 13 months of fieldwork in 2022-2023 looks at the political economy of electricity and energy in Pakistan, with particular attention to Chinese financed coal mining and power generation projects in Sindh.

Dr Abbas is an Energy and Climate Researcher at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). His current research is focused on technology innovation across the domains of energy systems (including fossil fuel and low-carbon sources), transport (including mixed modes such as passenger vehicles, rail, freight, and aviation), climate change (including adaptation, resilience, geoengineering and climate engineering), industrial decarbonisation (including Distributed generation/co-generation, Process emissions, Industrial feedstocks, Industrial carbon capture storage and utilization (CCUS) and Energy storage). Currently, working with Professor Benjamin Sovacool. He is a low-carbon development specialist with extensive experience in Climate Change and Energy policy in Africa. He holds an MSc. in Environmental Resource Management from Nasarawa State University Keffi Nigeria and MSc. Energy Policy at the University of Sussex United Kingdom. He co-founded the Africa Green Mini-Grid Community of Practice (AfGMG) and the African Partnership in Low Emission Development Strategies (AfLEDS).

I have 10 years of industry experience in the finance and banking sector, where I have held multiple roles within Human Resources and Business Process Management departments, leading regional and local projects on people transformation and change management.

Currently, I am a PhD Candidate in Management at the University of Sussex Business School, where my research examines how technology shapes employee voice processes and workplace communication. Supervised by Dr. Zahira Jaser and Professor Dimitra Petrakaki, my doctoral work focuses on how digital voice and communication platforms with AI-powered tools reconfigure employee voice - particularly the processes of listening to and acting on employee concerns, ideas, and insights. I am also an active member of the DDN network within ESRC-funded Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit). 

Alongside research, I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Human Resource Management at ADA University (Baku, Azerbaijan), where I co-founded the MSc in Human Resources Management program. My teaching is informed by extensive industry experience, where I led large-scale organizational development and people transformation projects. I also hold a CIPD Level 7 Diploma and am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE. This unique combination of academic research, teaching practice, and professional consultancy enables me to bridge the gap between theory and practice in advancing our understanding of technology-driven change in organizations.

With a keen interest in developing others Daniel holds a role at Sussex University as the School Tutor within the social work department. 

As a qualified social worker Daniel has managed services across the spectrum of statutory social work services from assessment through to adoption, and brings an extensive level of experience in providing services to separated (asylum seeking), children and families.

Daniel is an Independent social worker at social work immigration matters, specialising in assessments with separated asylum seeking children and families facing uncertainty with immigration matters. Providing expert reports  including international reunification assessments, best interest assessments (deportation), and age assessments. Daniel takes instructions from well-established legal firms in addition to well known charitable organisations working in the migration field. 

Throughout his career Daniel has provided guidance to numerous governmental agencies including assignments abroad in France and Albania. Daniel has represented services at the London Asylum Consortium (LASC),and has been part of the ADCS sub-group on age assessment and has produced anti-trafficking policy. 

Fulya Acikgoz is a Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Sussex Business School, UK. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol, UK. Her research spans a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on technology marketing and innovation management in various contexts. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Technovation, R&D Management, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Information Technology & People, International Journal of Consumer Studies, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Behavior & Information Technology, Journal of Computer Information Systems, and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. She is also the co-author of the book "Blockchain for Tourism and Hospitality Industries.

I am British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sussex University Department of English and Creative Writing. I completed my BA in English at Cambridge University (2014) and my MA and PhD in Literature at New York University (2019; 2022). 

Current Research:

My current book project investigates six European epic poems published during a thirty-year period: Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569), Luis de Camões’s Os Lusìadas (1572), Pierre de Ronsard’s La Franciade (1572), Juan Latino’s Austrias Carmen (1573), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96). My particular focus is on the relationship between slavery's literary, philosophical and material-historical associations in these poems. The book also explores the politics of early modern English translations including Edward Fairfax's Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600) and Richard Fanshawe's Lusiads (1655). It brings together transnational literary studies, history, critical race studies, classics and classical reception, among other things, demonstrating the relevance of Platonism to early modern theories of slavery and bondage as well as poetics.

I am also currently writing a Cambridge UP 'Element' on the concepts of accident and necessity in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It draws on classical and contemporary legal and philosophical thought (Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Agamben, Kripke, and Bernard Williams among others) to offer a reading of this long poem that is both directed and improvisational.

Public Research:

Occasion of the Season is a podcast about English Renaissance pastoral poetry, rural and social life, folk music, visual art, sheep and goats. It follows Edmund Spenser's poem The Shepheardes Calender (1579), through the year month by month. Each month Kat Addis talks with Spenser scholars from a wide range of universities and career stages about the poem, interspersing this conversation with various seasonal special features. So far, these have included sound recordings from Lisbon, an interview with goat farmers in Sussex, a goatherd in the Hebrides, an expert on children's literature in Colchester, and a poet in the Scottish borderlands responding to each poem. Listeners have so far described it as "a warm bath of intellectual complexity", and "informative and fun". It is available at https://occasionoftheseason.substack.com/podcast and all the major podcast platforms.

In April 2025 I organised a marathon reading of Milton's Paradise Lost at the Hollingdean Community Center, where I co-run this poetry group: https://www.hollingdeanwednesdays.com/poetry-and-writing-group/

Selected Publications:

“A ‘Debauchery of Judiciousness’ Directed at The Faerie Queene, Book IV Canto iv”, The Spenser Review 54.1 (2024), unpaginated.

“The Politics of Hunting: An Aristotelian Reading of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 67” in Edmund Spenser and Animal Life, co-edited by Abigail Shinn and Rachel Jane Stenner (Palgrave Macmillan, in press, 2024). 

Book Review, "Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude and Free Service in Early Modern England", The Spenser Review, 53.2 (2023)

“To Please the Best, and th’Evill to Embase”: Slavery Logic in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book VI”, English Literary Renaissance 53.2 (2023) *Winner of the Isabel MacCaffrey Award for best essay in Spenser Studies, 2025, International Spenser Society*. 

“‘What art thou Man, if Man at all thou art’: Spenser with Sylvia Wynter,” Spenser Studies, 37 (2023).

“Slavery, Allegory and Romance in Book VI of the Faerie Queene”, The Spenser Review, 51.3 (2021).

“Equipment for Living: Reading the Proverbs in La Franciade” in Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Eco-criticism, co-edited by Phillip John Usher and Pauline Goul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

Selected Poetry Publications

2025

"Three Poems" in The Chicago Review 68.02

"San Francisco" in Blackbox Manifold 34

Headgear (Three Count Pour/Selva Oscura)

2024 and earlier

The Song of the Fucking Rose (Slub Press)

"John Florio's Heroic Poem" in Poetry

Space Parsley (the 87 press)

• Reader in English, Department of English, School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex
• Director of Research, Department of English
• General Editor, The Yearbook of English Studies
• Trustee, Modern Humanities Research Association

Previous Roles:

• Visiting Research Fellow, University of Freiburg, 2013 — 2014
• Lecturer, Department of English, University of Dundee, 2010 — 2012
• Teaching Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature, University College London, 2010
• Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Teaching Fellow, Department of English & Related Literature, University of York, 2009
• Teaching Associate, Department of English & Related Literature, University of York, 2006 — 2008

• Doubtful Knowledge: Scepticism and the Birth of Political Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2026).
• The Epistemologies of Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025); 64 pp.
• Idleness & Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); 233 pp.
• Idleness, Contemplation, and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); 203 pp.
  
  Edited Collections:
  Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850, ed. with Catherine Packham (New York: Routledge, 2018); 255 pp.

Associate Professor in Accounting 
Course director for BSc Accounting and Finance


Sami's research interests lie in positive and capital market-based accounting research with a particular focus on fair value accounting, accounting information for distressed firms, employee ownership and industrial relations. He is also interested in topics relating to accounting information quality and corporate governance.

Gem Aellah is a social anthropologist specialising in global health policy and intervention, with a particular focus on equity, love, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). She is currently a Research Fellow in the Centre for Equitable Global Health Research and works closely with the BSMS Unit for Neglected Tropical Diseases to support impact-focused activities.

Her current research examines how policy is conceptualised, negotiated, and enacted by those involved in addressing conditions such as podoconiosis, scabies, and mycetoma across the UK, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. Alongside this, she leads a project exploring perspectives on the meanings and practices of equity in global health partnerships, with a focus on how equity is understood, operationalised, and experienced across different institutional and geographical contexts. She is also involved in a project supporting the development of an inclusive research group of researchers with lived experience, in collaboration with The Leprosy Mission.

A central strand of her work focuses on love as both an ethical and analytic lens in global health. She is interested in how love is mobilised, expressed, and sometimes constrained within policy, partnerships, and interventions, and how it shapes relationships between researchers, practitioners, and affected communities. Her research is characterised by a commitment to creative and participatory approaches to knowledge production and engagement. She seeks to develop accessible and impactful ways of communicating anthropological insights, and to foster more inclusive forms of research that centre the perspectives and experiences of those most affected by global health interventions.

Gem is Co-Chair of the UK Coalition Against NTDs Influencing Group and is a steering committee member of iCHORDS, a community of practice focused on social and behavioural science in neglected tropical diseases. Through these roles, she contributes to shaping advocacy, partnerships, and policy engagement around NTDs in the UK and internationally. Across her work, she is particularly interested in how global health policies and interventions travel across contexts, and how these are interpreted and put into practice by diverse actors, as well as in strengthening the real-world impact of research. Her broader research explores medical research and intervention as deeply embedded within social, economic, and political life.

Prior to her current roles, she conducted ethnographic research on mental health trials in East London and on transnational medical research in urban and rural Kenya. In Kenya, she contributed to the ‘trial communities’ research programme with Wenzel Geissler, an anthropological study of the social and ethical dynamics of an international HIV research clinic. She completed her doctoral research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she examined how long-term transnational medical research initiatives intersect with everyday life in a rural health and demographic surveillance site. Her work focused on the lived experiences of researchers, participants, and surrounding communities within intensive sites of medical research and intervention.

She previously worked at the Royal Anthropological Institute as Education Officer and later Research Officer, and is co-author of a workbook for global health researchers that encourages open discussion of ethical challenges when conducting research across inequalities.

Professor Matthew Agarwala is the Bennett Chair in Sustainable Finance at the Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, at the University of Sussex Business School. He is an economist interested in measuring and delivering sustainability, wellbeing, and productivity. Motivated by the belief that 21^st century progress cannot be described by 20^th century statistics, Matthew’s work seeks to transform economic measurement to better reflect sustainability, inequality, and wellbeing. He enjoys working across sectors and disciplines, and his co-authors include ecologists, economists, conservation scientists and practitioners, social anthropologists, civil servants, members of UK Parliament, and Nobel Laureates in peace, medicine, physics, and chemistry. Matthew regularly consults for governments and scientific organizations on topics of natural capital, ecosystem services, green finance, wellbeing, and sustainability.

In green finance, Matthew’s work uses AI to combine environmental-economic models with measures of sovereign credit risk to create the world’s first climate- and biodiversity- smart sovereign credit ratings. His work in economic measurement has contributed to the creation of the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounts, leading to the landmark adoption of global guidelines for measuring and valuing natural capital by the UN General Assembly in 2021. His work in productivity demonstrates how environmental impacts can be incorporated into productivity analyses at the sectoral and national level, providing integrated data and analytics for addressing Net Zero and productivity growth simultaneously.

Beyond Sussex, Matthew is a Research Affiliate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, a member of The Productivity Institute, Honorary Professor at Scotland’s Rural College, and Senior Policy Fellow at Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. He is a Member of the Board of the Footprint Data Foundation (appointed in 2024), has served as Chair of the Fiscal Policy Panel for the States of Guernsey since 2023 (appointed for a second term in 2024), and is Founding Director of Wealth Fair Economics, Limited (with Professor Pati Klusak). Matthew maintains active research networks in Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, USA, Japan, and throughout the UK. He is a regular media contributor (Bloomberg, NYTimes, FT, Guardian, Times, Channel 4 News, BBC) and has had over 300 print, radio, and TV media appearances across 40+ countries since 2019. 

Nearly three decades ago, Nkemdilim started her career with litigation and dispute resolution. She then moved on into corporate law practice, where she gained extensive hands-on experience in corporate governance, working in company secretarial capacity or head of legal for clients in such sectors as advertising, branding, commerce, property, finance and education. In the last several years of her thirty-old career, having discovered her passion for teaching, she has, in addition to her corporate law practice, begun to carve for herself a niche in education; and is currently enjoying teaching at higher education. Since has delivered sessions in Company Law, the Law of Contract, Business and Commercial Law, and the Law of Tort. 

Nkem believes that ADR has key roles to play in the Board Room, and is interested in exploring the advantages it could bring into relevant aspects of corporate governance. This is the next focus for her research, teaching, and practice endeavours.

Dr Mostak Ahamed is an Associate Professor in Finance in the Department of Accounting and Finance at the University of Sussex Business School, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He holds a PhD in Business and Management from Queen Mary University of London. Before joining Sussex, he taught at Queen Mary University of London, UCL and London Metropolitan University, and worked as a Research Assistant at the Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity—an experience that continues to inform his interest in finance, inequality and policy-relevant research.

His research examines how financial development, regulation and inclusion shape access to finance, bank behaviour, firm performance and labour-market inequalities. At its core, his work asks how financial systems can be made more effective, stable and equitable — particularly in developing economies and for groups historically underserved by financial institutions. His research spans financial inclusion, banking stability, corporate finance, gender pay gaps and firm outcomes, using robust econometric methods and large cross-country and firm-level datasets to address questions connected to contemporary policy debates. His work has attracted more than 2,000 citations internationally.

His research has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Banking and Finance, World Development, Economics Letters, Economic Modelling, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, British Journal of Industrial Relations and Research Policy. Beyond academic journals, his findings have shaped public debate, with coverage in the Financial Times, S&P Global Market Intelligence, The Conversation, BusinessLine, Idea for India and LiveMint. This public engagement reflects the wider relevance of his work on gender pay gaps in UK banking, transparency and financial-sector pay inequality, and the relationship between financial inclusion and bank performance.

He was shortlisted for the internationally competitive Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research in 2020 and received the University of Sussex Research Excellence Award recognising him as an emerging scholar. He actively contributes to the scholarly community as an ad hoc referee for a range of journals, including Economics Letters, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Economic Modelling, Journal of Financial Stability, Economic Systems and Borsa Istanbul Review.

At Sussex, Mostak teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in finance and banking, including corporate finance, international finance, and banking. He brings research-led and policy-facing finance into the classroom, with a strong emphasis on employability, professional accreditation and data-driven financial decision-making. He supervises dissertation students at both undergraduate and MSc levels and welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in financial inclusion, banking regulation, corporate finance and labour-market inequality.

I am Dr Shoaib Ahmed, an Associate Professor in Accounting at the University of Sussex Business School. As a critical accounting researcher, my work extends beyond the realm of accounting to explore organisational, social, and cultural practices, particularly in relation to gatekeeping, injustice, inequities, modern slavery, political capital, organisational violence, secrecy and transparency, and wage theft. 

In my research, I primarily utilise qualitative methods, including interviews, focus group discussions, and observational techniques. My papers have been published in prominent journals such as Human Relations; Journal of Management Studies; Organization Studies; and Work, Employment and Society.

I received the "LERA 2023 James G. Scoville Best International/Comparative Industrial Relations Paper Award" for the paper "Workplace bullying and intensification of labour controls in the clothing supply chain: post-Rana Plaza disaster", published in Work, Employment and Society. In addition, I was honoured to receive the "Research Excellence Award for Emerging Scholars 2024" and the "Outstanding Reviewer Award in the 2023 Emerald Literati Awards".

I am a VLSI front-end designer (FPGA and ASIC) and Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. As a research fellow, my work focuses on designing energy-efficient hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence on FPGAs. I have designed a pipelined vector processor integrated into an open-source RISC-V processor (CV32E40x) on kriakv260 FPGA. This is a fully-programmable RISC-V-based system-on-chip (Zainab Aizaz et al 2026 Neuromorph. Comput. Eng. 6 024013DOI 10.1088/2634-4386/ae688e), tailored to simulating large SNNs on modern UltraScale+ FPGAs. It uses the AXI datamover to efficiently stream weights from DDR4 memory into URAM and copy simulation output from URAM to DDR4 memory. Presently, I am working on ALVEO FPGAs to run very large SNN Models on a 32 core cluster of FeNN-DMA by leveraging the PCIe and HBM. I hold a Ph.D. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT), India (awarded 8 February 2024). My doctoral research focused on area- and energy-efficient approximate multipliers on ASIC and FPGA for error-tolerant applications.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex, working with Dr Phil Birch on advanced methods for group activity recognition using 6G radio-frequency sensing.

My present research lies at the intersection of graph neural networks, spatio-temporal deep learning, and human activity understanding. My overarching research focuses on designing and implementing efficient algorithms grounded in rigorous foundational mathematics.

I recently completed my PhD in Mathematics of Systems at the University of Warwick, supervised by Prof. Hongkai Wen (mlSysLab) and Dr Tanaya Guha (Social AI group). My doctoral research focused on designing memory-efficient, robust spatio-temporal models for skeleton-based human action recognition.

From October 2025 onward, I will focus on my EPSRC Pathway Postdoctoral Fellowship, where I will develop the next generation of invariant graph neural networks for skeleton-based human activity recognition. This project runs in parallel with my postdoctoral appointment, which is paused for six months during the fellowship.