"The Role of Sustainability in Central Banking" Conference Speakers

Biography

Elsie Addo Awadzi is the Women in Public Leadership Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Mrs Addo Awadzi is a multi-disciplinary professional and high-impact leader with 30 years of experience working in Ghana and internationally, in economic policy management, global economic governance, international development, financial sector development/regulation, corporate finance, and law.

She is formerly the Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, where she was a member of the Board of Directors and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, and oversaw key functions such as financial institutions regulation, supervision, and financial stability. She represented the Bank on several public sector Boards and on international groups such as the Basel Consultative Group, the Network for Greening the Financial System, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion whose Gender Inclusive Finance Committee she chaired for four years. Before her appointment as Deputy Governor, she was Senior Counsel of the IMF (Financial and Fiscal Law Unit) where she worked for six years advising IMF member country authorities on banking sector regulatory reforms, crisis management, financial stability assessments, public debt management and fiscal governance. She also taught and directed courses for IMF member-country officials in Washington D.C. and in IMF regional training centres in Vienna (Austria), Mauritius, and Singapore. Before joining the IMF in 2012, Mrs Addo Awadzi was a two-term Commissioner of Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission and in that role, was active in formulating policies and rules to regulate Ghana’s then-nascent capital market. She also consulted extensively on policy and legislative reforms, worked as a corporate transactions lawyer, and worked briefly as a Senior Treasury Dealer in banking.

Biography

Biography

Fabian Amtenbrink is Vice Dean and professor at the Erasmus School of Law of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of European Union Law. Since 2009 he is also Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. Moreover, he is Scientific Director of the European Research Centre for Economic and Financial Governance, a joint research initiative initiated by researchers from the Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam (Link ). His research and international publications focus on constitutional and institutional aspects of European Union law, as well as legal issues of (European) economic and monetary integration. Professor Amtenbrink, who studied law at the Freie Universität of Berlin (Germany) where he is fully qualified to practice law, holds a Dutch doctorate in law (PhD) on the democratic accountability of the ECB. He serves on the editorial board of the European Law Review and the Netherlands Yearbook for International Law, as well as being a principle editor of the Nijhoff Studies in EU Law Series (Brill). For further information, please visit this site.

Biography

Will Bateman conducts multi-jurisdictional research on the regulation of public and private finance, focusing on central banking, sovereign debt, digital currencies, and sustainable investing. His current work examines issues such as the fiscal role of monetary policy under high debt, central bank foreign-currency operations, non-economic advice to policy boards, and fiscal mutualization. He also leads projects on the regulation of artificial intelligence, with particular attention to sovereign AI and the effects of generative AI on democracy and the rule of law. In addition to his academic work, he collaborates with computer scientists and public and private sector partners. Before entering academia, he served as a judicial associate at the High Court of Australia and the Federal Court of Australia. He also worked as a litigator at Herbert Smith Freehills.

Biography

Nik de Boer is an Associate Professor in Public Law at the University of Amsterdam and an affiliate member of McGill University’s Faculty of Law. His research focuses on challenges to constitutional democracy, including democratic backsliding, the role of courts, EU constitutional law, and the legal architecture of money and central banks. His work has been published in leading journals, and his 2023 monograph Judging European Democracy (Oxford University Press) examines the democratic legitimacy of national courts reviewing European law. He leads a multidisciplinary project on safeguarding democracy and serves on several boards and advisory bodies, including the European Constitutional Law Review and the European Parliament’s ECON committee. He teaches public law courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels and supervises students in his research areas. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has held visiting positions at institutions such as the European Court of Justice and Harvard Law School.

Biography

Elia Cerrato García is an Assistant Professor of Commercial Law and Financial & Banking Regulation in the Department of Law at CUNEF Universidad. Postdoctoral researcher in the STAREBEI-EIB programme funded by the European Investment Bank at the University of Trento (2024-25). Her research addresses sustainable financial regulation, the mandates of European Union institutions-especially central banks-and the enforceability of financial "green" promises in capital markets from a comparative perspective. She has participated in European and national projects (NET-SYNC, CCFS, PRIN). She was a member of the European Banking Institute's Young Research Group and she is part of the Sabin Center's Global Network at Columbia University, where she served as Regional Leader (2022-2024).

Biography

Paul Fisher holds a PhD and spent 26 years as a senior official at the Bank of England, including serving as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee. Since 2016, he has pursued a portfolio career that includes roles as Chair of the LBMA, a board member of the UK Debt Management Office, and affiliations with seven universities, three as a Visiting Professor. He has contributed to sustainable finance policy as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance, the UK Green Finance Task Force, and the Green Technical Advisory Group. He is the editor of Making the Financial System Sustainable (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He also works as a consultant as principal of PGFpolicy Ltd and serves as Chair of LiCuido Ltd.

Biography

Seraina Grünewald is a Professor of International Economic Law and Finance Law at the University of St. Gallen and a Part-time Professor at the European University Institute. Before joining the University of St. Gallen in 2024, she held the chair for European and Comparative Financial Law at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is also a member of the Academic Board of the European Banking Institute (EBI), an academic fellow with the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Genoa (EUSFiL) and a member of the Committee on International Monetary Law of the International Law Association (MOCOMILA).

Seraina Grünewald teaches and conducts research in the fields of sustainable finance, central banking, the digitalization of money, Banking Union, and bank resolution as well as constitutional and institutional aspects of economic and monetary governance in the EU. She is frequently invited to present at international and European authorities, including the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Stability Mechanism, and the Single Resolution Board.

Biography 

Sarah Jane Hlásková Murphy is Lead Legal Counsel in the Directorate-General Legal Services at the ECB, where she advises on the legal framework underpinning monetary policy and the ECB’s mandate. Her work focuses in particular on the interaction between EU law, central banking, and emerging policy challenges such as climate change and sustainability. She has contributed to key ECB research and policy discussions, including on the legal dimensions of monetary policy strategy and climate-related risks. She is also an academic contributor to the growing field of sustainable central banking, authoring a chapter on the ECB’s climate action plan in the 2026 Cambridge University Press volume Central Banking and Sustainability. Her work sits at the intersection of law, monetary policy, and sustainable finance, with a particular emphasis on how central banks can act within their legal mandates to address environmental challenges.

Biography

Danae Kyriakopoulou is an economist and Co-Head of the Bank of England’s Climate Hub, where she helps set strategy to ensure the UK economy and financial system are resilient to climate-related risks and their implications for macroeconomic and financial stability. Previously, she was a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics, working with Lord Nicholas Stern and leading policy engagement for the G7, G20, COP, and the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action on climate, finance, and development.

She has also served as Chief Economist and Director of Research at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, as Senior Economic Adviser to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and as Managing Economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research. She holds degrees from the University of Oxford and in 2022, she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Biography

Pierre Monnin is a Senior Fellow at CEP and a Visiting Professor in Practice at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work focuses on monetary policy, financial regulation, and their links with environmental and social sustainability. Prior to that, he was with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in various roles for ten years – with a focus on financial stability and macroprudential policy as well as on financial markets developments. He also worked at Man Investments, developing asset allocation strategies for alternative investments, and was a Lecturer in international money and finance at the University of Neuchatel. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich, a MSc in Economics from Queen Mary, University of London, as well as a MSc in Statistics and a BA in Economics from the University of Neuchatel.