Research group
My group brings together PhD students working on machine learning and evolutionary computation for finance, business and speech. Ten PhD students currently work with me. Eight have completed their PhDs with me, six at Essex and two at Kent, and I was nominated for PhD Supervisor of the Year at Essex from 2022 to 2024.
Current PhD students
Ogechukwu Kingsley Umeh
LLMs for algorithmic trading
Adam Spano
Scaling laws and directional changes for trading
Andrew Clayman
LLM generated trading strategies
Mazen Mohmed Ahmed
LLMs for structuring financial filings
Sulaiman Akhtar Kiani
Optimal re-training of ML-based trading strategies
Karthik Kolluri (second supervisor)
Efficient speech recognition and audio captioning models
Rio Surendran
Causal discovery methods
Sirui Zhu
Machine learning for financial time-series forecasting
Raghav Sharma (part-time)
Reinforcement learning for algorithmic trading
Nee Norteye Barnor (part-time)
Machine learning for temperature forecasting in weather derivatives
Completed PhDs
- 2025
Dr George Rayment
Deep reinforcement learning for trading strategy development on high-frequency currency data using directional changes sampling.
- 2025
Dr Ivan Evdokimov
Innovations to fundamental stock valuations: estimating future earnings per share and free cash flows using statistical and machine learning methods.
- 2025
Dr Xinpeng Long
Financial forecasting with the combination of physical and event-based time using genetic programming.
- 2024
Dr Fatima Zahra Habbab
Machine learning to investigate the role of real estate in a mixed-asset portfolio.
- 2024
Dr Ozgur Salman
Trading strategies optimization using a genetic algorithm under the directional changes paradigm.
- 2024
Dr Evangelia Christodoulaki
Fundamental, sentiment and technical analysis for algorithmic trading using novel genetic programming algorithms.
- 2022
Dr Adesola Adegboye
Estimating directional changes trend reversal in Forex using machine learning.
- 2017
Dr Sam Cramer
New genetic programming methods for rainfall prediction and rainfall derivatives pricing.
Joining the group
I am always looking for strong PhD applicants in machine learning for finance and business. Current areas include algorithmic trading, deep reinforcement learning, LLMs and NLP for financial text, forecasting and applied AI for industry and the public sector.
Before applying through the University of Essex research degrees page, please email me at mkampo@essex.ac.uk with your CV, transcripts and a one-to-two page research proposal. Tell me which of the research themes your idea fits and why.