PJ Beaghton is an Honorary Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and co-leads the Imperial College Network of Excellence in Financial Technology (FinTech). His FinSec research utilises artificial intelligence (a) to identify security threats to the financial markets such as the contagion across exchanges, products and regions of intended or accidental disruptive shocks in the electronic securities and derivative markets, and (b) to perform forensic analysis of complex transactions in securities and derivatives in order to identify suspicious patterns linked to money laundering and other criminal activities.

He is also involved in research with Professor Austin Burt (Life Sciences) and the Target Malaria consortium on reaction-diffusion systems and stochastic simulations and agent/individual-based models of vector population dynamics. The primary focus is on modelling the usage of selfish genetic elements to genetically manipulate natural populations of mosquitoes that transmit malaria.