People

Alice Barron is a violinist and collaborator based in London.

She enjoys a varied career combining orchestral, chamber and solo performances with improvisatory and multi-disciplinary projects. Specialising in contemporary and intercultural musics, recent performances include projects with Nigel Kennedy, Jean-Luc Ponty, L. Subramaniam and with Sam Lee at WOMAD festival in Australia and New Zealand. Alice’s collaborative work is genre-spanning and draws on her experiences studying South Indian violin techniques.

Maan is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, and a research affiliate of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.

Maan completed his DPhil in human geography at the School of Geography and the Environment in 2013 (Clarendon and Senior Hulme Scholar, Brasenose College). He has an undergraduate degree in the biological sciences from India (First class; 1st; honours) and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management (Distinction), also from Oxford.

Maan’s research is situated within environmental and cultural geography, the central axis of which focuses on the spatialities, politics and governance of the living and material world. It conceptually develops two of geography’s vibrant sub-fields – more-than-human geography and political ecology – with which he has engaged through his doctoral and postdoctoral research. Maan teaches environmental and human geography at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Hid work engages political ecology and posthumanist thought to develop new understandings of the geographies of nature. Of particular interest are nonhuman ecologies and processes pertaining to production, landscape and knowledge. Maan’s ongoing and past work interrogates these ecologies through a number of empirical foci, including urban ecologies, nonhuman labour and commodity production, and historical and contemporary more-than-human geographies. A theme cutting through these empirics is the traffic between nature and capital, and more broadly, between ecology and economy.

Maan lectures on the ‘Environmental Geography’ foundation course for undergraduates, besides conducting tutorials on various human geography topics for different colleges. At postgraduate level, he co-teaches a module on ‘Conservation and Society’ on the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, and convenes an option ‘Urban Political Ecology’ for masters students across the School of Geography and the Environment.

Janet Bately is Sir Israel Gollancz Professor Emeritus of English Language and Medieval Literature, King’s College, London.

A student at Somerville College Oxford, she began her academic career at Birkbeck College London, where she was successively Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and Reader, moving to King’s College, London as Professor of English Language and Literature in 1977. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and made CBE in 2000. Still actively engaged in research, her specialisms are in Old English language and literature, and bilingual dictionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries.

I am a Departmental Lecturer in Biology (Behaviour) in the Department of Zoology at Oxford. I’m currently studying the effects of mating on female aggression in fruit flies, and looking at female-female aggression in a variety of other species (including humans!). 

I am broadly interested in all things evolutionary, particularly those related to sexual or social selection. My research ranges from genital morphology to female aggression and the expression of secondary sexual characters. I’m currently based at Christ Church College and the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford in the UK. I’m interested in a broad range of topics and am always happy to talk about potential collaborations. My main focus right now, though is on female-female competition, with the majority of my work looking at the role of mating in increasing female aggression in fruit flies.

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.

In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society

After a PhD in Radio Astronomy in Cambridge, Tony Bell worked on radar signal processing with Marconi before moving to the Central Laser Facility as a laser-plasma theorist.  In 1985 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Plasma Group at Imperial College.  In 2007, following two years with the Methodist Church, he moved to a joint appointment between the Clarendon Laboratory and the Central Laser Facility.

His research encompasses laboratory and astrophysical plasmas.  He wrote one of four independent papers proposing the theory of cosmic ray acceleration by shocks.  He showed how strong magnetic field is generated during particle acceleration and how it enables cosmic ray acceleration to high energy.  He initiated the theory of non-local transport for heat flow in Inertial Confinement Fusion, explained the collimation of laser-produced energetic electrons by resistively generated magnetic field, and with John Kirk demonstrated the possibility of electron-positron pair production in ultra-high intensity laser-plasma interactions.

He has been awarded the Hoyle Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

For more information, see Professor Bell’s departmental web page.

Elaine and the Treasury team are responsible for the College accounts, banking and finances, for student fees and battels, for payments to suppliers, for invoicing, for loans and grants to students including vacation and hardship grants, and for general advice on financial matters, particularly in cases of financial difficulty.

Doreen Boyce (1953, PPE) is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville and former Provost and Dean of Faculty at Chatham College (1974-1980).

An influential campaigner for equal opportunities in the workplace, she was President of the Buhl Foundation (1982-2007) and founded the Executive Women’s Council to provide a source of collective support and influence for professional women.

I’m Alfie (he/him) and I’m super excited to work be one of your welfare officers this year!

I am a big music fan, playing, writing, streaming, singing, going to gigs or whatever else, (did someone say top 0.5% Taylor Swift fan on Spotify?). I also love baking, so if you have cooked up any cool creations please send me pics and I will be very jealous of you for getting to eat them!

Our role as welfare officers is to make sure Somerville is a place where people can feel comfortable, welcome, and able to talk freely about any mental health issues they may be facing. Despite restrictions in England having been almost completely eased, coronavirus is still likely to impact student experience this year, so we want to make sure that you can access all support available to you. We’re here to provide non-judgmental support for any concern you might have. I have completed 24 hours of peer support training to develop the necessary skills to support students. Katie will do the peer support training in Oxford as soon as they can.

We’ll also be hosting fortnightly welfare teas where you and your peers can come and enjoy all the (free!) snacks and take some time out of your hectic Oxford life to relax. Members of the welfare team will also be there, but there’s no obligation to talk to them if you’re just in it for the free food and chill. In 5^th week (aka welfare week) we’ll be hosting tons of events to help fight off those pesky 5^th week blues (activities normally include a bouncy castle and having alpacas visit on the quad, a cookie fairy and much more!!).

At Somerville I teach English Final Honours School Paper 1 ‘Shakespeare’, Paper 3 ‘Literature in English 1550-1660’, and Paper 4 ‘Literature in English 1660-1760’ to second and third year students. I also teach these papers at Christ Church. I have previously been a lecturer in Renaissance literature at St Peter’s College and a teaching fellow of the Ashmolean Museum.

My research focuses on literary history, with an emphasis on how formal innovation makes and modifies figures of authority (mythical, historical, authorial, and rhetorical). I am particularly interested in tensions between performance and print, and classical and vernacular literatures. My DPhil thesis, which I am revising into a monograph, contends that occasional forms of early modern drama are central to understanding not only the rise of the commercial theatre that produced Shakespeare, but also the history of Arthurian literature. I am also working on two new projects which focus on the work of John Dryden and Shakespearean miniature books, respectively.

Lesley Brown is Centenary Fellow in Philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. She has published articles on ancient philosophy, contributed introductory material to Plato, Selected Myths (OWC, 2004) and introduced Plato’s Protagoras and Meno for Penguin Classics.

Paula Pimlott Brownlee is an American higher education consultant, and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College.

After studying for a DPhil in Organic Chemistry at Oxford, she became a research chemist and then an academic, holding professorships at several American universities. In 1990 she became President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Averil Cameron is a scholar of the Literature and history of the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Periods. She was Warden of Keble College from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies.

She held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in the Faculty of Theology 2011-13, and is chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. Averil is President of CBRL (Council for British Research in the Levant) and was President of FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques) from 2009-14.

After several recent contributions on the general history of late antiquity and Byzantium Averil Cameron is now returning to her earlier interest in Christian literature. Her Leverhulme project is focused on the large corpus of prose dialogues written by Christians, mainly in Greek, from the second century AD to the end of Byzantium. Some works exist about the earlier material, but there is no existing study which looks at the phenomenon as a whole, or relates the dialogues to other forms of Christian and non-Christian writing.

Hi there, my name is David (Zheyi) Cao, and I am a DPhil student in Clinical Medicine studying computational cancer genomics. My primary research goal is to identify the cell-of-origin of Barrett’s Oesophagus/Oesophageal Adenocarcinoma through investigating the genome-wide mutations.

As the 23-24 MCR President, I am leading the MCR, which includes all the social secretaries, welfare officers and representatives who are responsible for various events, schemes and projects run at the MCR. I also lead the MCR general and committee meetings, report to College Principal every fortnight and represent our MCR sitting on College committees and Student Union. More importantly, I will always be ready to provide support for the students at Somerville so that everyone could enjoy their study and life at Oxford. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any enquiries about the MCR, or anything else.

Dr Margaret Casely-Hayford (1980, Jurisprudence) is a lawyer, businesswoman and prominent advocate for diversity in education and public life.

She is the Chancellor of Coventry University and Chair of The Globe Theatre.

One of the first black British women to become a partner in a City law firm, she was named Black British Business Person of the year in 2014. After a 4 year stint as chair of charity ActionAid UK, she was awarded a CBE in 2018 for charitable services. She was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2020.

I studied for his MChem at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. I did a joint sponsored DPhil between the University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source, supervised by Professor Simon Clarke at the Department of Chemistry and Dr Silvia Ramos at the Core EXAFS beamline B18 at Diamond. My background is in the synthesis and characterisation of superconducting materials – using a combination of low and high temperature synthesis techniques, and a variety of characterisation methods centring around diffraction, absorption spectroscopy, and magnetometry.

I have been a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at St Catherine’s college since 2012, tutoring 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate chemists. In April 2019 I was appointed to manage the Inorganic Materials Characterisation Facility in the Chemistry Department of the University of Oxford and my current research greatly benefits from the strong collaborative links within the Chemistry department.

Hi all! My name’s Juliette, and I’m a DPhil student in Economics working on environmental economics.

Within the Somerville MCR, I am the Music Rep. I organise the piano lessons and a couple of music events for graduate students – karaoke, open mics and concerts, anything goes (well, mostly in Hilary term now, given the full events that we’re having already in MT)! If you have ideas for something music-related, please feel free to reach out – Juliette.

Dr Esther Cavett specialises in teaching music theory and analysis to the music students in Somerville College, and is Personal Tutor for Prelims.

Alongside her work at Somerville, she is Tutor in Music at Jesus and Lincoln Colleges, and Oxford Music Faculty Chair. She is also Senior Research Fellow in the music department at King’s College, London, where she co-ordinates the King’s St George’s Academy, which offers small-group, after-school music teaching for children living in Southwark, involving King’s College, London students as teaching assistants.

She set up and now assists in the running of Water City Music, a charity providing access to performance opportunities for musicians of all skills levels, working collaboratively, and she is trustee of The Society of Music Theory (SMA), where she was sponsor the SMA Music Literacy research programme and for the SMA’s widening participation offering generally.

Her recent publications and publications in progress focus on music literacies and pedagogies, the ethics of writing about living composers, and the perception of repetition in the music of English contemporary composer Howard Skempton. 

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I am a clinician scientist with a particular interest in pre-eclampsia and angiogenic factors.

We recently conducted the first clinical trial on the use of sFlt-1/PlGF ratio in the management of patients with suspected pre-eclampsia (Cerdeira AS et al. Hypertension 2019). Data from our study and previous observations lead to the development of a protocol that is now used in clinical practice. My aim is to continue exploring the role of angiogenic factors in the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of pre-eclampsia, hopefully leading to meaningful changes in patient care.

News:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/new-blood-test-takes-doubt-out-of-pre-eclampsia-pp5mmv30p

https://www.ouh.nhs.uk/news/article.aspx?id=1058

Sumedha Chakravarthy holds a bachelor’s degree in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and a master’s in Comparative Literature from SOAS, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. Since her MA, she has worked as an urban and media studies researcher in Delhi. At Oxford, she hopes to further her training and research in urban anthropology and history. She seeks to study how diverse communities experience, navigate, and shape contemporary urban landscapes in South Asia.

I am interested in the application of insights from behavioural economics to policy-making. My doctoral research at the Blavatnik School of Government seeks to focus on biases in information processing and belief updating in the context of the spread of health-related misinformation in India. Ultimately, my goal is to help governments develop effective policy solutions, which are grounded in theory and supported by evidence.

Prior to starting at Blavatnik, I worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Sir Julian Le Grand at the Marshall Institute, London School of Economics. In this role, I drew upon economic and psychological theory to study and model altruistic behaviour and conducted empirical research to understand the factors underlying ethical consumption choices. My experience of working in the social development sector, at Becoming I Foundation cultivated my interest in policy research. In collaboration with Teach for India, I worked to bring reforms in education for low-income groups in New Delhi and engaged directly with the beneficiaries, which helped me see how policies affect people on the ground.

I received my undergraduate training in economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and a Master of Sciences in management and strategy from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. My master’s thesis focussed on discouraging consumption of single-use plastic bags while grocery shopping online and studied the effects of behavioural interventions on fostering a commitment to reuse carry bags. The paper is now published in the journal Behavioural Public Policy (2020).