Our community continues to expand by welcoming new professors from the University of Ottawa as Faculty members, supporting our mission to research, analyze and shed light on the complex and interdependent relationships between law, technology and society, and guide policy makers in Canada and around the world.
Canada’s leading research group on technology law, ethics and policy, the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society now brings together 32 Faculty members across the Faculties of Arts, Engineering, Law, and Social Sciences, with 16 Associate members and more than 150 fellows, researchers and students in an interdisciplinary environment.
Our three new Faculty members are:
Dr. Sophie Nunnelley, an Assistant Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa. Her scholarship especially takes up issues of health and mental health law, legal capacity and decision-making, human rights, and the regulation of health artificial intelligence. As a 2023-2024 AMS Fellow in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence, she is investigating the implications of mental health AI for rights such as informed consent and non-discrimination. She is also part of a CIHR-funded research project, Machine MD: How Should we Regulate AI in Healthcare, conducting research and convening cross-disciplinary case studies on specific health-AI technologies and their regulatory requirements. Learn more about her.
Dr. João Velloso, an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean, Graduate Studies at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. He works in the areas of sentencing and ‘sanctioning’, criminology applied to criminal law, immigration law, and sociolegal studies with a focus on the judicialization of social problems and the governance of security through the intersections between criminal law and administrative law. His research deals with the penalization of protesters and migrants, access to justice in detention, drug policy and regulations, legal education, and deliberalization of democracies. As part of his research agenda, he examines the (ab)uses of risk assessments and surveillance tools, and other technological infrastructures in criminal law and administrative law-based regimes.Learn more about him.
In addition, as previously announced, the Centre is also delighted to welcome Dr. Bassem Awad, an Associate Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa and new Director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC). He brings extensive expertise in intellectual property, technology law, innovation policies, and data governance. As the new Director of CIPPIC, Dr. Bassem Awad will help advance the clinic’s work on pressing legal and policy challenges shaping the digital landscape. Learn more about him.