Karen Yeung is the University of Birmingham’s first Interdisciplinary Chair, taking up the post of Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics and Informatics at the University of Birmingham in the School of Law and the School of Computer Science in January 2018. She has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Melbourne Law School since 2016. Karen is currently a member of the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on human rights dimensions of automated data processing and different forms of artificial intelligence (MSI-AUT) and Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on Genome Editing and Human Reproduction (since 2017), a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Biotechnology (since 2016) and a former member of the Royal Society-British Academy Working Group on Data Governance (2016-2017).

Her recent publications include The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology (co-edited with Roger Brownsword and Eloise Scotford) in 2017, and she is joint author of the Royal Society-British Academy report Data management and use: Governance in the 21st Century (2017). She is admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), having completed a brief stint in professional legal practice. Karen is on the editorial boards of Big Data & Society and Public Law. As an Interdisciplinary Chair, she is keen to foster collaboration between academics from across a range of disciplines, and to initiate dialogue between academics and policy-makers across various disciplines concerned with examining the social, legal, democratic and ethical implications of technological development, and in seeking to promote informed, inclusive and human-centred technology policy-making. Her current research focuses on critically understanding the legal, democratic and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, Big Data driven predictive decision-making and advances in neuroscientific techniques across a wide range of policy domains including commerce, healthcare, legal services and the enforcement of law. She completed her undergraduate degrees at Melbourne Law School and the Melbourne University Faculty of Business and Economics, subsequently obtaining a Bachelor of Civil Law and a D Phil from Oxford University. She is admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), having completed a brief stint in professional legal practice.