Marzia Briel-Barr

Email:
marzia.briel@reading.ac.uk
Phone:
+44 (0) 118 378 4948
Job title:
Lecturer in Law

Responsibilities:

Director of Continuing Professional Education and Executive Education
Research integrity specialist

Areas of interest

Marzia’s academic interests centre around identifying and solving the risk of exploitation of public knowledge, goods, utilities and funds. Bringing over 15 years of global regulatory and governance experience to Academia, she is solution and impact driven in her research activities. The key themes of her Research include Exploitative Governance ecosystems, Regulation (including Risk-based Regulation and Artificial Intelligence Regulation), Global inequity, Science Policy, Land Law and Intellectual Property Law.

Postgraduate supervision

Marzia has supervised over 17 Masters Dissertation Projects, whose interests align with her research areas.

Teaching

Marzia’s teaching draws on her professional experience as a legal and risk professional, as well as her research on regulation, intellectual property, science, ethics and emerging technology. She currently teaches the following undergraduate and postgraduate modules:

Advanced International Commercial Law issues (PG)
Intellectual Property (UG)
Land Law (UG)

Research projects

Marzia is the Lead academic principal investigator on an interdisciplinary Accelerated Knowledge Transfer Project, funded by Innovate UK, to investigate the impact of AI data mining on Open Access Research Data in the Higher Education environment.

The project survey determines how open access research and datasets are used by Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT, Bing, Claude etc). The Participant Information Sheet can be located here.

Background

Marzia is a qualified South African Attorney specialised in Commercial Law, with career experience in the Global Financial Services industry in various Legal, Compliance and Risk Governance roles. In 2020, she moved into the Public Science and Engineering sector working for the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the legal, policy and governance aspects of science research data, public/private partnerships and the legal and ethical complexities of publicly funded science research. Her agile and cross-disciplinary experience have allowed her to identify and find solutions to emerging exploitation risks where public knowledge, goods, utilities and funds are at stake.

Academic qualifications

Qualified Foreign Lawyer, Master of Law (Commercial Law), Bachelor of Law, International Compliance Association Diploma in Compliance.

Professional bodies/affiliations

Member of the UNESCO Working Group on Open Science Policy and Policy Instruments implementing the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation
Member of Society of Legal Scholars
Centre for Commercial Law and Financial Regulation
The Embassy of Good Science

Recent speaking engagements and conference participation

Marzia presented ‘Ready, Fire, Aim: The new regulatory framework for AI and data science in the UK’ Unlocking Digital Heritage and Creative Industries through Data Science and AI’ funded by the Alan Turing Institute (2023).
Panellist at the book launch ‘Beyond Data: AI regulation and Human Rights’ written by Professor Alessandro Mantelero, to discuss how AI intersects with Human Rights, Ethics and Society, Data Protection and Risk Management (2023).
Presented at the World Research Integrity Conference on ‘Can Open Data create funding for Research?’ and selected to be part of the Doctoral Forum (2022).
Panellist at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the WG Hart Workshop, ‘Responding to the Crisis: Law, alternative economies and activism’ where she presented on ‘Open Research in Developing Countries: The risk of commercialisation of open data for economic benefit.’(2022).

Recent events organised

‘Artificial Intelligence Community of Practice networking event (2023).