Dr Lachlan D. Urquhart 

I am a Senior Lecturer (~Associate Professor) in Technology Law and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. I am Founder and Director of the Regulation and Design (RAD) Lab, in the Institute of Design Informatics. I am a Director of the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance, and Privacy (CRISP). I am part of the management team of the Designing Responsible NLP Centre for Doctoral Training, and Design Informatics.

My monograph Accountable Design: Bringing Law into Human-Centred Computing was published by Cambridge University Press in August 2026.

My co-edited book with Lilian Edwards and Catalina Goanta, Law, Policy and the Internet, is being published by Hart Bloomsbury in September 2026.

I have published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in leading venues across computing, law, and ethics such as CHI, TOCHI, DIS, PUC, NORDICHI, IRLCT, IDPL, IJLT, CLSR, .

I have an interdisciplinary background in both human computer interaction and technology law. My LL.B was at University of Edinburgh, and my LL.M in IT Law was completed at University of Strathclyde. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the Mixed Reality Lab / Horizon CDT at University of Nottingham.

I have been an investigator on projects totalling nearly £17m. Current project include the Face[Rec] Co-Designing Live Facial Recognition governance in Scotland (2026-2027) and the UKRI £9.75m Responsible NLP AI Centre for Doctoral Training (2024-2032). I was Principal Investigator of the £1.2m EPSRC ‘Fixing the Future: Right to Repair and Equal-IoT’ project (2022-225) and Co-Investigator on the EPSRC £3.2m Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance Node (2020-2024), various projects in the EPSRC £4m Horizon Trusted Data Driven Products hub (2020-2025), the £750k ESRC/JST Emotional AI in Smart Cities project (2020-2023), EPSRC £1.2m Defence Against Dark Artefacts (2018-2022), AHRC/ESRC UK-Japan and TAS Hub Envisioning Biometric AI Futures project (2023). I was also part of the €4m DCODE Network Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) on rethinking design (2020-2024).

My main research interests are in the socio-technical aspects of designing, living with, and regulating emerging information technologies. I have a multidisciplinary background in computer science (PhD) and law (LL.B; LL.M) and I have studied at the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde, and Nottingham. I am an editor on the Routledge Book Series on Surveillance Studies.

I am a scholar in residence at Digital Futures at KTH in Stockholm, and was hosted at School of Computer and System Sciences (DSV) at University of Stockholm. I was a Visiting Researcher and Founding Member of the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute from 2018-2025 (when the Institute wound up). I have been a visiting scientist at Fraunhofer AICOS, Porto (2021); a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (2020-22), a Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Centre, Universitá degli Studi di Milano (2022-23), and a visiting researcher at Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo (2014). I am member of the international Emotional AI Lab. At Edinburgh, I was the Law School lead for the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society 2019-2023 and the IT law director for the Scottish Research Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT) from 2021-2025; and I am a research associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.