Support Staff

Neeraj manages OICSD’s partnerships, strategic communications, research outreach design and relationship building, and is responsible for the Centre’s operations.

He works with the Research Director on developing the Centre’s research strategy, global presence and impact.

Neeraj’s research interests are in social policy in India with a focus on its social justice approach. He works on issues of accessibility to public services in education and healthcare for marginalised sections of Indian society.

Previously, Neeraj worked as a Research Support Officer at the Oxford Internet Institute where he administered the Visiting Research Fellowship and the internal departmental ethics process. He holds an MSc in Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice from the School of Oriental-Asian and African Studies (SOAS) University of London.

Clare is the Academic Office Administrator. She assists the Academic Registrar in the running of the Academic Office. Clare also is the lead for Somerville Degree Days. 

Professor Simon is a physicist interested in quantum effects and how they are manifested in phases of matter.

He has recently been studying phases of matter known as “topological phases” that are invariant under smooth deformations of space-time. He is also interested in whether such phases of matter can be used for quantum information processing and quantum computation. Before coming to Oxford, Dr. Simon was a research director at Bell Laboratories, an industrial research laboratory.

Dave Simpson manages all aspects of the College’s Catering and Conference activities.

Nisha Singh is a senior postdoctoral researcher in psychopharmacology at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford.

Prior to this, she worked at King’s College, London where she trained in PET imaging as part of an MRC funded program. Nisha completed her DPhil in Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. Her project involved identifying and developing a repurposed drug, ebselen, for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Ebselen is currently undergoing a clinical trial in Oxford for efficacy in mania. Nisha has a keen interest in drug and biomarker development, especially in the field of psychopharmacology.

Justin is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Masters program in Mathematical & Computational Finance.

Justin’s research lies at the intersection of applied mathematics, machine learning, and high-performance computing and is focused on theory and applications of Deep Learning. Justin develops deep learning models for large financial datasets such as: high-frequency data from limit order books, loans, and options. He is also developing deep learning methods for constructing partial differential equation models from data, which has a variety of applications in science, engineering, and finance.

Justin received his PhD from Stanford University and holds a Bachelors degree from Princeton University. He was a Chapman Fellow at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College. He was awarded the 2014 SIAM Financial Mathematics and Engineering Conference Paper Prize.

Jacqueline is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow in the Coles/ Dendrou Lab at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology.

Jacqueline’s research focus is to understand the role of early human B cell response (extrafollicular response) which has a vital role in rapid antibody production. By integrating human challenge models, ex vivo cultures, and single-cell genomics, she aims to address a fundamental immunological question about early human B cells and their impact on long-lived antibodies. Findings may facilitate tailored nextgeneration vaccination and adjuvant strategies to enhance long-term memory responses.

Professor Emma Smith (1988, English) is an internationally renowned Shakespeare scholar and current Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford.

Professor Smith’s work explores the influence of Shakespeare on stage, print, and in wider culture. She has written on Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) – the first collected edition of his plays – and is interested in how Shakespeare came to be so important.

An associate scholar of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Professor Smith is also a regular speaker in schools, literary festivals, theatres, libraries, and book groups, as well as in universities. She has extensive experience of both print and broadcast media, including on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC News, as well as authoring articles for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Observer and The Guardian.

Professor Smith’s recent publications showcase her ability to combine forensic close-textual reading with sweeping surveys of the reception given to Shakespeare in performance, print, and criticism. Her 2019 book This Is Shakespeare was a Sunday Times bestseller and her 2022 book Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize.

Professor Smith has worked with theatre companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Donmar Warehouse. In 2023, she was the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe, and she has served as a consultant for TV and film, including Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, and the BBC series ‘Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius’ (2023).

Professor Smith’s next full-length work, The First Elizabethans, is a study on Elizabethan artistic culture from architecture to music to gardens to fashion, and will be published by Penguin in 2026.

Professor Emma Smith lives in Oxford with her partner Elizabeth. She was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College in June 2025.

Dr Smith is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the group of Prof. Christopher J. Schofield, FRS, jointly based in the Department of Chemistry and Ineos Oxford Institute.

Her research centres on the discovery and development of novel antibiotics to combat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. In particular, she is pioneering innovative methodologies to elucidate the interactions between antibiotic candidates and their bacterial targets.

Beyond her scientific work, Dr Smith is actively engaged in outreach and public engagement initiatives aimed at raising awareness of antibiotic resistance and inspiring the next generation of scientists to pursue careers in research.

Iyiola Solanke is Jacques Delors Professor of European Union Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Somerville College.

Professor Solanke was previously Professor of European Union Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds Law School and the Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the University. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i School of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law and Harvard University School of Public Health.  Professor Solanke is a former Jean Monnet Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She is an Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple.  

Her research focuses on institutional change, in relation to both law and organisations. Her work adopts socio-legal, historical and comparative methodologies. She is the author of ‘EU Law’ (CUP 2022), ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law’ (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti- Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017), as well as many articles in peer reviewed journals.  

She founded the Black Female Professors Forum to promote visibility of women professors of colour, and the Temple Women’s Forum North to promote engagement between legal professionals and students in and around Yorkshire. In 2018 she chaired the Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL and she is currently leading two research projects: Co-POWeR, an ESRC-funded project looking into the impact of COVID on practices for wellbeing and resilience in Black, Asian and minority ethnic families and communities; and Generation Delta, a RE/OfS-funded project promoting access to and success in PGR study for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women. 

Other current projects focus on legal protection from weight discrimination as well as de-colonising European Union law. 

Hello! My name is Jerry, and I am a DPhil student in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. I specialise in informatics and data science research, with a focus on climate change and road networks.

I am from Vancouver, Canada, where I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. In my free time, I enjoy going to the gym, cycling around Oxford, and exploring local coffee shops and green spaces.

I’m excited to be part of Somerville’s fantastic community. Please feel free to reach out if you need any support, have a welfare concern, or want to have a chat — I’m here to help!

I have undertaken the following training for my role as Student Welfare Advisor:

• First Aid Training offered by St John’s Ambulance
• Junior Deans Training offered by the University Counselling Service
• Health and Safety Training – Somerville Lodge Porters
• Fire Evacuation Training – Somerville Lodge Porters
• Welfare Policy and Procedures – Student Welfare Lead
• College Rules and Procedures – Decanal Officer
• Introduction to Safeguarding – Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Partnership

Dr. Sontag González works on spatially-resolved luminescence approaches to date old archaeological sites in Spain.

Through innovative methods including infrared-radiofluorescence and infrared-photoluminescence of feldspar minerals, Dr. Sontag González is targeting Middle and Early Pleistocene localities relevant for human evolution studies to test the limits of state-of-the-art luminescence dating of sediment.

Previously, Dr Sontag González has worked as a postdoc at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), Stony Brook University (USA), and Justus Liebig University of Giessen (Germany), primarily investigating IR-RF dating methodologies and the complex interplay between luminescence characteristics and chemical composition. During her PhD at the University of Wollongong (Australia), she focused on improving available approaches to date samples from volcanic regions in Indonesia. She originally trained in molecular biotechnology and then transitioned into archaeological sciences.

View Dr Sontag González’s latest publications

Professor Southerden’s main area of research is in medieval Italian literature, particularly the works of Dante and Petrarch and early lyric poetry.

Academic background

Francesca Southerden holds a BA (Honours) in Italian and French from Somerville College, Oxford and a D.Phil in Italian literature from Hertford College, Oxford. Before joining Oxford she was Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-16) and Mary Ewart Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College (2007-10).

Research

Francesca Southerden’s main research interests are in medieval Italian poetry, particularly Petrarch’s lyric poetry and Dante’s Commedia. Her most recent book, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (Legenda, 2022), explores the significance of the garden for Dante and Petrarch’s thinking about language and desire and how the authors reimagine Eden in their poetic works. This book develops, within a medieval context, the concern with the relationship between desire, subjectivity, and poetic space that was at the heart of her first monograph, Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (Oxford University Press, 2012). She recently co-edited, with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi, The Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford University Press, 2021) and, with Manuele Gragnolati co-authored, Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy (ICI Berlin Press, 2021). She is interested in the relationship between literature and critical theory, including affect studies, ecocriticism, and queer theory, and in lyric studies from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her current projects, which include both collaborative and single-authored projects, involve ecological and comparative ways of thinking (with) medieval poetry.

Teaching

Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature – including Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and thirteenth-century lyric poetry – to undergraduate and postgraduate (MSt and MPhil) students. She regularly supervises DPhil students in Italian, many of whom are working on interdisciplinary projects in medieval studies. In addition to being Professor of Medieval Italian at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Somerville College, Professor Southerden holds the post of Lecturer in Italian at St Catherine’s College and at Lady Margaret Hall. Prior to Oxford, she held the post of Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-2016). 

A list of publications can be found on Professor Southerden’s departmental page.