Speaker Biographies
Mina Chiang
Dr Jonathan Eyal
Elijah Glantz
Cathy Haenlein
Sir Stephen Kavanagh KCMG QPM DL
Dr Alexander Kupatadze
Magda Long
William Lyne
Professor Heather Marquette
Matthew Redhead
Jennifer Scotland
Dr Eyal is the Associate Director, Strategic Research Partnerships, and International Director, at the Royal United Services Institute.
He was born in Romania, but has lived most of his life in Britain. Educated at Oxford and London Universities, his initial training was in International Law and Relations, in which he obtained both his first degree and his Master's with a Distinction. His Doctorate, completed at Oxford in 1987, analysed relations between ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe since the end of the First World War.
After teaching at Oxford for three years, Dr Eyal was appointed a researcher at RUSI. Since 1990, Dr Eyal has been Director of Studies at the Institute, and also serves as a Senior Research Fellow and Editor of the RUSI Newsbrief .
Dr Eyal has completed books on military expenditure in the former Warsaw Pact and published a study on military relations in the Balkans during the time of Communism. He is a regular commentator on East European affairs for The Guardian, The Independent, The Times dailies and the Observer newspaper on Sundays.
He has also given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on the conduct of British foreign policy in Eastern Europe, and the teams of experts which contributed to the peace plans for the former Yugoslavia. He has acted as an adviser to the European Union's studies on the process of dividing the assets of the former Yugoslav state, and has published two studies on the errors committed by the West in handling the Balkan conflict since 1991.
He is fluent in English, French, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian and German.
Elijah Glantz is a Research Fellow for the Organised Crime and Policing Team (OCP) at RUSI. His research at RUSI focuses on criminal networks structures, illicit finance and law enforcement responses around the world. Specific projects include illicit finance and law enforcement capacity in sub-Saharan Africa, state involvement in organised crime and narcotics, and trends in UK organised acquisitive crime.
Furthermore, Elijah is engaged in OCP’s ongoing work on policing and policy engagement with government officials – in the UK and globally – on a range of OCP’s research topics. In addition to leading and supporting research projects with OCP, Elijah is the Co-Project Manager and Lead Editor for the Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research (SHOC) – OCP’s blog for practitioners, academics and experts on organised crime. Elijah holds an MSc (Distinction) in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics where hew as awarded a distinction for his dissertation which modelled cartel fragmentation following cartel leadership removals in Mexican states from 2008-2013. He also holds a BA in Political Humanities from Sciences Po Paris in France.
Cathy is Director of the Organised Crime and Policing research group at RUSI, with expertise in serious and organised crime, illicit trade and development. Cathy is Chair of RUSI’s Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research, established in partnership with Research Councils UK’s Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security.
Prior to joining RUSI in 2012, Cathy worked in the international development sector as a Project Development Specialist in Madagascar, as well as spending five years in Italy, working with European publications on EU–African relations and migration.
Cathy has a particular focus on environmental crime, and has led fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Madagascar, Seychelles, Malawi, Mozambique, Gabon and Sierra Leone. She is the editor of Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Security in Africa: Myths and Realities (Routledge, 2016).
Cathy has contributed to a variety of publications and media outlets such as the BBC and CNN, and has provided briefings on key aspects of the organised crime threat to high-level fora from the G7 to the OECD, European Parliament and Global Counterterrorism Forum.
Sir Stephen Kavanagh is a distinguished global law-enforcement leader with more than three decades’ experience directing complex national and international policing operations. He served as Executive Director of Police Services (EDPS) at INTERPOL from 2020 until the end of 2024, the organisation’s most senior operational policing role, where he led international responses to human trafficking, crimes against children, cybercrime, organised crime, terrorism, and financial crime across 197 member countries.
At INTERPOL, Sir Stephen oversaw the transformation of global police services through advanced data analytics and machine-learning capabilities, combining 19 major INTERPOL databases for the first time to strengthen global threat identification. He directed major multinational operations—including against human trafficking, cyber-enabled fraud, drug trafficking, and terrorism—and launched the INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. Under his leadership, INTERPOL expanded partnerships to combat child sexual exploitation, strengthened the approach to Corrective Measures and delivered new global task forces and capacity-building programmes.
Before joining INTERPOL, Sir Stephen was Chief Constable of Essex Police, leading one of the UK’s largest forces through a major modernisation programme and pioneering digital transformation with the first implementation of the multi-force Athena records-management system.
He previously held several senior commands within the Metropolitan Police Service, including Commander of Counter-Terrorism (SO15), Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Territorial Policing, then Specialist Operations, and was the national lead for ‘Protect and Prepare’ counter-terrorism strategy.
A former Senior Responsible Owner for the UK’s Digital Policing Portfolio, he has long championed ethical, data-led innovation in public safety. Sir Stephen also holds senior governance roles across global organisations, including Chair of the Board of Childlight and Secretary General of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC).
He is a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG), awarded for services to international policing and public safety, and holds the Queen’s Police Medal (QPM). Sir Stephen was awarded an MPhil in Criminology from the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Doctorate of Law from Anglia Ruskin University.
Magda Long is Visiting Research Fellow at the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence at King’s College London. She has two decades of combined work and academic experience in defence and security, intelligence and risk management. Her research examines how states use covert activities to pursue their foreign policy objectives and mitigate national security threats, and as a tool in hybrid warfare.
Will Lyne is currently the Head of Intelligence at the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), leading a range of multidisciplinary teams that lead, support and coordinate the Law Enforcement cybercrime response in the UK.
Will has worked in Law Enforcement over 12 years. From 2011 to 2013, Will worked in Afghanistan delivering counter narcotics investigations with local, military and international partners, before joining the NCCU in 2013. From 2016 to 2020, Will was an International Liaison Officer assigned to the FBI’s Cyber Division in Washington D.C., USA.
Will is an experienced and internationally respected leader in the field of serious and organised online investigations, leading on a number of high profile cases covering money laundering, fraud, kidnap & extortion and computer misuse.
A 2008 Graduate of University College London and a 2018 Graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Will is currently studying for PHD at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, focusing the ransomware threat.
Professor Heather Marquette is Professor of Development Politics at the University of Birmingham and leads the FCDO-funded Serious Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Evidence (SOC ACE) research programme. SOC ACE’s research, conducted in collaboration with a number of leading research organisations and in consultation with key stakeholders, focuses on tackling serious organised crime, illicit finance and transnational corruption through politically feasible, technically sound interventions and strategies. Heather is also seconded part-time to FCDO’s Research and Evidence Directorate as Senior Research Fellow (Governance and Conflict) and is an Expert Member of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime’s expert network.
Matthew Redhead is a researcher and writer on financial crime and national security topics, and an independent risk consultant to the FinTech and RegTech sectors. He is a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI, and is also a regular contributor to Jane’s Intelligence Review on serious organised crime, financial crime, terrorism and intelligence.
He has extensive experience in financial services, having trained as a ‘front office’ banker for HSBC in the 1990s, and worked for seven years in various senior roles in that same bank’s financial crime risk function, leaving as Global Head of Strategic Intelligence in April 2018. He has also served as a government official at the MoD, and on secondment at the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the Home Office. He has considerable experience working in several fields of management consultancy for PwC and Matrix Knowledge Group.
Jennifer Scotland is a Research Analyst in the Organised Crime and Policing team at RUSI. She holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Bristol.
Prior to joining RUSI, Jennifer was a Research Analyst on the Americas country intelligence desk at Janes, an open-source intelligence defence and security provider, where she monitored security threats in Latin America, including regional organised crime trends. Her research at Janes included investigations into illicit resource extraction driving deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a deep-dive into organised crime-driven insecurity in Ecuador, monitoring of the Colombian peace process between the government and primary non-state actors, as well as a report exploring cocaine trafficking trends between the Americas and Europe in 2023. At RUSI, Jennifer is involved in the environmental crime portfolio, exploring issues such as the illegal wildlife trade and associated illicit finance in Africa and Latin America.
