Professor Olga Simson and Professor Roman Maydanyk speak to Professor Julia Hörnle about their research and how the war with Russia has affected them and their work.
They joined the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London a year ago as British Academy/Council for At-Risk Academics Fellows. This scheme enables Ukrainian academics and their dependants to settle in the UK and continue their research for two years.
Professor Simson is an Associate Professor at Yaroslavl Mudrii University in Kharkiv, where she has founded an associate Institute for Intellectual Property Law, Art Law and Fashion Law. Her research interests are digital art, the law of copyright and non-fungible tokens and their legal challenges. She has also founded a digital art platform, for which she received highly competitive industry funding. She has been collaborating mainly with the Queen Mary Institute of Art Law.
Professor Maydanyk is one of the leading civil law professors in Ukraine, especially in the field of property law. He researches the field of digital property law and the status of virtual assets such as crypto. He has collaborated with work streams in our Cloud legal project and has fed his expertise as a civil lawyer in our comparative law discussions. He is a professor at Tara’s Shevchenko University in Kyiv and has influenced law reform in Ukraine on digital assets through his advisory position at the Ukrainian Parliament.