Chief engineer and founder of Riversimple, Hugo Spowers is also a recognised thought leader on the Circular Economy, as architect for the business model, technology and governance of Riversimple. Hugo graduated from Oxford with an Engineering degree and has an MBA from Cranfield University. Hugo is responsible for all technical aspects of the cars and for the architecture of the business itself.

Hugo has been asked to speak on the Circular Economy numerous times–e.g. at the Cambridge Centre for Industrial Sustainability in 2015; the CE100 meeting in Milan in 2016; a UNIDO conference on the Circular Economy in the automotive industry on Bratislava 2017; he delivered a keynote speech at the EIB/ECB on creating a circular value network at their annual conference; and he was invited to speak at the launch of the Circular Cars Initiative at Davos 2020 by the World Economic Forum.

Hugo will be providing strategic support and thought leadership for the business outreach activities as well as strategic support and operational guidance for the Pilot Projects.

Fiona Spowers is Riversimple’s communications director and has over 30 years’ experience in the advertising business. Having worked for agencies in London and Paris, she went to become head of strategic planning across Europe for 9 years and globally for another 10 years for TBWA, one of the top global advertising agencies. Fiona is the Project’s Senior Responsible Officer.

Julia Chesney-Roberts graduated from University of the West of England, Bristol with an LLB(Hons) Law and Spanish and is currently studying an MBA at Warwick University. She is Commercial and Legal Manager at Riversimple with specific responsibility for strategic projects and Circular Economy activity. Julia has worked internationally with start-ups to corporations and across a number of industries in roles like Compliance & Regulations Manager, Operations Manager and Programme Manager. Julia is the Project Delivery Coordinator for the contractual agreements and open source Pilot Projects.

Roland Whitehead has had a design-led career working on physical and digital products and services. He has been involved in environmental projects since college days and spent 7 years helping extend products’ lives as a director of one of the major auction houses. He was founder and CEO of the UK’s leading enterprise open source solutions business working on anything from micro-services to solutions for international clearing banks. Roland is the technical coordinator for the all of the Pilot Projects.

Dr Monica Vessio is a commercial lawyer with over 12 years of experience, having worked internationally with a diversity of clients in several industries. She has advised startups that were utilising blockchain technology in the supply chain and acted as commercial legal consultant for various corporate clients. She holds the role of researcher in Circular Revolution and is critically examining the regulatory ambit within which the circular supply chain will operate, including the smart contracts milieu, both in the B2B and B2C environments.

Dr Severine Saintier is Associate Professor in commercial law. Dr Saintier is a contract law specialist (loosely defined looking both at B2B and B2C relationships). She has published numerous journal articles as well as books (sole authored and co-authored).She is co-editing a textbook in this area (Poole’s contract law) with Professor Merkin. Dr Saintier is the legal strategic support & operational guidance academic lead for contractual agreement Pilot Project of the Operation looking at the legal questions surrounding smart contracts. She is helped in that task by DrVessio.

Dr Stefano Barazza leads the Legal Innovation Lab Wales at Swansea University, a unique ERDF-funded initiative to promote applied research in legal technology, and is an experienced researcher focusing on the intersections of intellectual property,technology and competition. He has previously led postgraduate training for the UK Intellectual Property Office and is a co-editor of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (OUP). He has published extensively in the areas of patent law,standard technology, secondary innovation and competition. His current research,funded by Horizon 2020, focuses on the use of smart contracts, in a blockchain context, to license IP assets. His contribution to the Circular Revolution project aimsto explore the use of smart contracts to support the open innovation model that is atthe core of the project. As Director of the LLM Legal Tech at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Stefano is also keen to inspire younger generations to embrace the transformative potential of technology in the legal field–a potential that the Circular Revolution project fully embraces and realises.

Spyridonas Georgiou is a research assistant within the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University focusing on the applications of legal technology and especially on the use of smart contracts in a blockchain context. He has previously worked on a project where he conducted innovative research around the legal requirements surrounding the development and operation of a blockchain platform which uses smart contracts to conclude licensing transactions. He holds a postgraduate degree in Legal Tech where he specialised on how technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain impact legal services, explored the legal and regulatory challenges associated with emerging technologies and gained expertise on digital intellectual property, computational thinking, and legal tech entrepreneurship. He has both a mathematical and legal educational background, so he has researched around the legal status of blockchain-based smart contracts from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. His role at the Circular Revolution project is to research into open innovation models within a circular economy context and to contribute to on-going research into the use of smart contracts and blockchain technologies to enable collaboration between commercial partners to maximise the opportunities afforded by a circular economy relationship.

Ethan is a law graduate who has an untamed fascination with new technological developments and making the world a cleaner and greener place. From setting up, drafting, and judging the Smart Contract Writing Competition based on the year 2122, to writing papers and his university dissertation on cryptocurrency and its place in English Law, he is determined to be part of this revolution and make an impact in the world using this. He is no stranger to hard work, and thoroughly enjoys working with likeminded people.