Evangelos Pournaras

Professor Evangelos Pournaras serves as the Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. He is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow with a research grant of £1.4 million and has held prestigious positions as a Research Associate at the UCL Center of Blockchain Technologies and an Alan Turing Fellow. With over five years of research experience at ETH Zurich, he earned his PhD from Delft University of Technology and has been a visiting researcher at EPFL. His industry experience includes a role at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Professor Pournaras has received numerous accolades, including the Augmented Democracy Prize and first prize at the ETH Policy Challenge, alongside multiple paper awards. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals and has successfully secured funding for several national and EU projects, including H2OforAll and SoBigData. His research focuses on the self-management of decentralized systems that empower citizen participation, aiming to create sustainable, democratic digital societies. He explores decentralized optimization and collective learning in citizen-driven networks, addressing the challenges of resource sharing and citizen engagement in emerging domains such as Smart Cities and Smart Grids.