Professor Anna Huggins

Biography

Anna is a Professor in the School of Law. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of regulation and compliance, with a particular focus on digital regulation and environmental compliance. A key theme in her research is exploring the design and legitimacy of evolving regulatory and compliance approaches in response to disruption. Anna publishes widely on innovative regulatory and compliance responses to digitisation and automation, including rules as code, automated decision-making, regulatory technology and digital compliance. She led a research project on the opportunities and challenges of digitising regulation with CSIRO's Data61 from 2020-2021. She currently leads an ARC Linkage Project (2023-2026) on optimising digital compliance processes in financial services organisations. Anna has also published extensively on the evolution of environmental regulation and compliance processes, including research monographs with Routledge (2018) and Edward Elgar (2022).

Anna is the Director of Studies (Law), having previously served as the acting Director of Education from April 2022 - March 2023, the Director of Undergraduate Programs (Curriculum) from 2017-2020, and the acting Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching from July-December 2018. Anna has a Master of Laws (Research) in legal education, which led to a number of publications on curriculum design in law, as well as a co-authored textbook. She was recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2020.

Anna holds a PhD from UNSW Law, for which she received a 2015 PhD Excellence Award. She also has a Master of Laws (Research) degree from QUT, and a Bachelor of International Studies/Bachelor of Laws (Hons) degree from UNSW. She is a chief investigator and former co-leader of the Governing Digital Societies research program in QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre. She is interested in supervising research projects in the areas of  digital and data-driven regulation, automated compliance, and environmental regulation and compliance.

Before joining QUT, Anna worked at UNSW Law and the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1634-3505