Lorna Woods is professor of Internet Law at the University of Essex and a member of the Human Rights Centre there. She started her career in private practice, advising in the technology, media and telecommunications sectors. Since moving to academia, she has taught, researched and published in these fields. Her most recent project, with Carnegie UK Trust, is on the regulation of social media, work which formed the basis for the UK's 2019 Online Harms White Paper and for which she received an OBE. She is a senior associate research fellow at the Information Law and Policy Centre at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, and a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, and of the Digital Freedom Fund's Panel of Experts. She has sat on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) National User Group, advising the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the police since 2015.

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