Dr. Soulla Louca | Institute for the Future and University of Nicosia

Prof. Soulla Louca has been nominated by LATTICE80 in partnership with Miss Kaya as one of the top 100 women in Fintech for 2019. She is one of the first academics to get involved in blockchain technologies (2014) when she assumed the responsibility of the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Nicosia. The Blockchain Initiative (renamed later to Institute For the Future) has designed and developed the first MSc worldwide in Digital Currency, the technology for publishing academic certificates on the blockchain (http://block.co/). She has been active in organizing tech events including the Decentralized series (www.decentralized.com ) as well as research. For seven years, she headed the Domain Committee for ICT for the European program COST (www.cost.eu ) for the 36 Member States of COST. Main duties were the evaluation and monitoring of the ICT Actions, which bring together more than 3000 researchers in areas like e-Society, Information Security, Networks, Nanotechnologies, etc. Furthermore, she was responsible for identifying trends, boosting pioneering research activities and help define strategies in science and technology through the organization and participation of strategic initiatives for promoting the ICT policy in Europe and beyond for the betterment and new digital experiences of European citizens. Even though her research interests for many years focused on information society (socio-economic aspects of ICT, e-learning, social integration and digital divide), due to her COST activities she had the opportunity to disperse her knowledge and work over a wide range of subjects such as personalized medicine, women in ICT, and open access. This enables her to integrate the knowledge she has gained over the years into a consistent worldview with a wider division of labor for working towards raising the standard of living for the European citizens and beyond. Her mandate ended successfully in September 2014. She is a professor in the newly founded Department of Digital Innovation as well as a Director at the Institute For the Future at the University of Nicosia.