About Robert Wardrop

Robert Wardrop is an economic sociologist based in the Finance Group at Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include understanding how social relations influence the financial decision-making of business owners, particularly under financial stress, and exploring the role of regulation in operationalizing technological innovation in financial services. He entered academia in 2010 following a lengthy career as a professional investor, having worked internationally for a large US-based family office investment company. Currently, he serves as the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the largest research centre within the business school. He leads a team of 20+ researchers focused on investigating channels and instruments of finance that emerge outside the traditional financial system and how these developments affect both regulators and the firms they regulate. He also teaches graduate-level courses on these topics in the MBA and Master of Finance programmes, and he designs and delivers executive education programmes to help participants respond to alternative finance developments impacting their industries and careers. Additionally, he is an Executive Committee member of the Cambridge Centre for Data Driven Discovery (C2D3), which brings together academic and industry expertise to advance research in big data analysis and application. Beyond the university, Robert Wardrop holds a portfolio of senior advisory and board-level positions with governmental, inter-governmental, and corporate organizations. He is the founder and CEO of RegGenome, a spin-out company that evolved from the Regulatory Genome Project. He was awarded the CJBS Teaching Award in 2022 and the Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award in 2021 for his work on the Regulatory Genome Project, which aims to translate human-readable regulatory information into machine-readable formats.