Professor Mimi Zou holds the chair in commercial law and is Senior Academic Lead and Co-Director of the Centre for Commercial and Private Law at Exeter Law School.

She has undertaken extensive research and teaching in the areas of comparative contract, commercial and employment law, particularly in relation to new technologies such as AI, blockchain, crypto/digital assets. In a previous appointment at the University of Oxford, she founded and led Oxford's first lawtech innovation lab. Her research has appeared in leading journals and won highly competitive international prizes, awards and fellowships. Among the winners of the British Academy Talent Development Awards to date, she was the only recipient from the legal discpline.

Prof. Zou is an English and Australian qualified lawyer with 20 years of international experience in academia, business and government. She has held/holds high-profile advisory roles at numerous organizations, including the UK Government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, UNIDROIT Working Group on Private Law and Digital Assets, World Economic Forum Experts Network and the World Bank Group's Taskforce on Technology and Access to Justice.

She graduated with the BCL & DPhil degrees from the University of Oxford and law and economics first class honours degrees from the University of Sydney.