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Research by Somerville graduate students

Somerville's graduate students are very committed to furthering their study by undertaking and producing the highest quality research.

If you would like to add your research interest to that of the MCR members below please contact the webmaster.

Hugh Wolgamort: -

I'm in the Department of Engineering Science, doing research on ocean wave energy devices. The title of my thesis is likely to be something like "Nonlinear hydrodynamics optimisation of a wave energy device". In particular I am concerned with the interactions between wave energy devices deployed in arrays, and the effects of these interactions on absorbed power.

Ian Robertson BBSRC DPhil student based in biochemistry: -

*The molecular basis of LTBP function*

Latent transforming growth factor beta binding proteins (LTBPs) are a class of proteins that have many similarities with the fibrillins. Mutations fibrillins and LTBPs cause a number of genetic diseases affecting development, fibrillin mutations for example can cause Marfan's syndrome, a relatively common genetic disease.

My aim is to understand how LTBPs function on the molecular level, using structural, biophysical and biochemical techniques in vitro, and with the aim of developing models that can be further tested in vivo by us or our collaborators. My initial focus has been on understanding the interaction between LTBP's and fibrillin, using Nuclear magnetic resonance and surface plasmon resonance, and various other techniques.

By understanding precisely how LTBPs are regulated in the extracellular matrix we hope to provide vital insights into the mechanism of TGF-beta signalling, which could have wide reaching consequences for understanding both human development and human disease.

Annie Demosthenous: (MCR President): -

My DPhil title is 'Poetry and national identity in Cyprus and Scotland', and it consists of a comparative study of a selection of poetry from Cyprus and Scotland with the aim of establishing how issues of marginality affect the reproduction and attempts at creation of a national identity in poetry.

Martin Gould: -

My primary research interest is limit order trading in foreign exchange markets - a topic that I ?nd fascinating because of the interplay between individual trading strategies and aggregated market dynamics. Through my research, I aim to advance understanding of how macroeconomic concepts such as price formation grow out of the tightly governed microstructure in the market, with a particular examination of how limit order book dynamics give rise to large price changes occur around the release of macroeconomic news.


Tao-Hsin:-

I am a Dphil student in Clinical Medicine. My thesis title is "structural biology of cellular signal transduction."

I am interested in investigating how the cell responds to its environment. Particularly, I focus on how ligands interact with their specific cell-surface receptors to trigger the downstream signal transduction pathways.



Franziska Maria Hack:-

DPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology
"The syntax and prosody of interrogation - evidence from Northern Italy" (working title)

My DPhil research is concerned with question formation and aims at determining which syntactic, morphological and prosodic markings have to be present in an utterance so that it is understood as a question.


I am concentrating on the Northern Italian area as the varieties spoken there exhibit a huge degree of variation in question formation, show some thrilling phenomena (e.g. obligatory question particles) and hence represent a particularly promising research area. My research is based on data collected on my own in the course of several fieldwork trips in the Dolomitic Ladin valleys and other rural places in Northern Italy.


Apart from determining the fundamental characteristics of interrogation my research also aims at analyzing and providing an account of the variation observed in question formation. 

Kerui Min:-

The title of my dissertation will be " Compressed Sensing, low-rank matrix recovery with applications"

The dissertation will talk about the problem called "Compressed Sensing", coined by Professor Terence Tao, David Donoho and several other world-class mathematicians. The main idea of Compressed Sensing is to use an efficient convex optimization algorithm to solve a combinatorial problem, which was considered intractable before due to the high complexity. The technique can be used to many fields such as statistics, machine learning, signal processing, computer vision etc.