Questions, methods & fieldwork
Understanding complex systems, from financial crime detection to Arctic environments.
My doctoral work centres on financial crime systems, alongside research in criminal investigations. The areas below also include developing criminological questions, earlier Arctic research and exploratory side projects; they represent different stages of work.
01 / Core PhD research
My doctoral research examines the systemic limitations of anti-money-laundering systems: what actors can know, what they can realistically process, and how institutional incentives shape the use of information and capacity. I combine formal analysis, empirical research and simulation to study effectiveness beyond model accuracy or reporting volumes.
How do fragmented observations, rare events and limited review capacity constrain detection? I examine these boundaries alongside the incentives, authority and relationships of banks, regulators and law enforcement.
Developing an agent-based simulation of financial activity, monitoring, investigation and enforcement. The aim is to test how changes in data sharing, resources and institutional arrangements affect the wider system, including unintended consequences.
Developing a structured language for representing financial-crime cases, entities, transaction flows and transformations. It supports consistent case analysis and reusable scenarios for simulation and evaluation.
02 / Investigative technology
I investigate how information systems and AI can support criminal investigators working with large, fragmented collections of evidence. A central distinction is between extracting an entity from a document and establishing why it matters to an investigation. The work combines studies of investigative practice with language models, information architecture and evaluation.
Evaluating what automated extraction can recover from real case texts, how mentions can be resolved across documents, and which entities deserve investigative attention. Investigator annotations provide a practical point of comparison rather than an assumption of perfect ground truth.
Understanding the infrastructure investigators need for coordination, evidence and decisions, alongside flexible tools for exploration. Developing directions include graph-based knowledge representation and assistance with hypotheses, with privacy and secure deployment built into the design.
03 / Crime, surveillance & social control
Alongside my published work on economic crime, I am developing questions about how crime and social control emerge. These exploratory directions connect local conditions, criminological explanations and the limits of surveillance.
A proposed study of how social proximity, limited anonymity and local institutions shape crime, safety, trust and policing in Longyearbyen.
Making the assumptions and mechanisms of criminological theories explicit, so explanations from different traditions can be compared and combined.
Studying how overlapping surveillance systems affect people, and where the limits of proportionate monitoring should lie.
04 / Measurement, fieldwork & operations
My earlier research in physics and safety engineering draws on fieldwork on Svalbard and research cruises. It provides a foundation for continuing interests in environmental measurement and safe Arctic operations; the simulation ideas below are longer-term exploratory directions.
Electromagnetic methods for estimating ice thickness and investigating ice ridges. Current interests include calibration, georeferencing and combining instrument records with positioning data to make field measurements more reproducible and useful.
Building on research into Arctic safety events to examine maritime operations, incident consequences and response capability. A longer-term simulation direction asks where and when effective assistance is possible, accounting for weather, sea ice, mobilisation and available assets.
05 / Curiosity-driven research
These are side projects I pursue because I enjoy researching. They sit outside the core doctoral work and vary in maturity, but share an interest in explaining interesting phenomena through physics, mathematics and simulation.
Exploring physically interpretable measures of swimming efficiency using hydrodynamics, physiological models and data available from wearable devices. The aim is useful comparison across swimmers and measurement conditions, rather than another opaque performance score.
An exploratory agent-based model of technological civilisations in a simulated galaxy. It examines communication, expansion and strategic behaviour under astronomical distances and relativistic delays, where agents must act on incomplete and outdated information.