Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Dr Frank Prochaska is an historian of modern Britain and the author of a number of critically acclaimed books.

He was born in America but has lived much of his life in Britain and has dual nationality. He has taught at universities on both sides of the Atlantic and in recent years taught British history at Yale. He moved to Oxford in 2010, where he became a member of Somerville and Wolfson Colleges. He has been a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London University, and a Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. He lectures and reviews widely and contributes to media programs and the press in Britain on such subjects as contemporary social policy and the monarchy. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, London University, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Somerville. As a scholar of Victorian social reform and ideas, he helped to establish the programme of work on the John Stuart Mill Library and its rich store of Mill annotations that is currently underway in Somerville.

See more about Frank Prochaska here.

Jane is a social historian, writer and lifelong friend of Somerville College. Born in Edinburgh and raised on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, Jane has been an ardent bibliophile since the age of seven, when she was banned from the local library for using a jam-tart bookmark in their copy of Squirrel Nutkin.

Jane first came to Somerville as a student, where she took a degree in English Language and Literature before moving to London to work in the antiquarian book trade. It was during this time that Jane’s first book (Wayward Women) was commissioned. Today, Jane works as a full-time writer and lecturer, specialising in social history through women’s eyes. She is the author of over a dozen books, including social histories of women’s education and the fight for the Vote, as well biographies of pioneering figures such as Josephine Butler and Mary Seacole.

Today, Jane lives just outside Oxford  but can be found once a week in the Somerville archives, cataloguing our Special Collections.

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.

Lisa Gygax (1987, PPE) has been Liz Cooke’s ‘apprentice’ since 2014. In her role as joint Secretary to the Alumni Association she shares Liz’s keen interest in the myriad of pursuits that Somervillians get up to after leaving Oxford. Her role extends to stewarding our various alumni networks.

Charlotte leads a programme of research which focuses on understanding relationships between clinical communication and behaviour change.

She currently holds an EDI-Themed Fellowship, from the THIS Institute, and previously held a Mildred Blaxter Fellowship from the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. She additionally holds research grants from the British Heart Foundation, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.

Her research has contributed to national guidelines, and she has advised government and policy makers. She is a member of the NICE Adoption and Impact Reference Panel, and an honorary member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics. In 2022 she was the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) Principal Investigator of the Year.

Charlotte is an experienced teacher and educator. Alongside her teaching role at Somerville she leads research methods courses within the Primary Care department and Medical Sciences division. She hold a postgraduate certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, awarded with Distinction.  In 2023 she was recipient of both the Medical Sciences Division ‘Excellent Supervisor’ award (recognising her significant contribution to supervision within the division), and the Society for Academic Primary Care Education Prize.

Key papers

• Clinician–patient communication about emergency aerial medical evacuation in case of infectious disease
• Relationship Between Clinician Language and the Success of Behavioral Weight Loss Interventions
• The importance of language in engagement between health-care professionals and people living with obesity: a joint consensus statement

I am the Departmental Lecturer in Physical & Theoretical Chemistry.

I teach Chemistry at Somerville in addition to two other colleges, Lady Margaret Hall, and St Peter’s. Previously I held Lectureships at Magdalen, Merton and New.

I studied for my MChem degree at Magdalen College (2008-2012) before moving to New College for a DPhil in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Stuart Mackenzie, which I completed in 2016.

My position involves teaching all aspects of the undergraduate Physical Chemistry course, from Prelims (1^st Year) to Final Honours School (3^rd Year). I hold tutorials for small groups of students where we discuss the lecture course material in more detail. We also meet in larger groups for problems classes to cover the more numerical aspects of each topic, and I offer thematic revision classes to prepare each group of students for their respective exams. In the Chemistry department, I provide synoptic revision lectures to all years and examine the first year Physical Chemistry Prelims paper.

My DPhil research was concerned with the photochemical spin dynamics of proteins, suggested to be the basis of the magnetic sense in some animals. It involved the development of a range of highly sensitive optical cavity-enhanced techniques to detect very small changes in reactivity caused by an external magnetic field.

Antony graduated from Oxford University Medical School in 2006 and commenced Higher Surgical Training in Trauma and Orthopaedics in 2010. Having previously completed the Oxford Academic Foundation Programme and an Academic Clinical Fellowship, he is now an Academic Clinical Lecturer.

During his training he spent three years out of programme working towards a DPhil in Musculoskeletal Sciences in Oxford supervised by Professor Glyn-Jones and Professor Carr. His thesis explored how activity levels during adolescence effect hip development and the future risk of osteoarthritis.

Antony currently has three main research interests:

1) Blood Management in Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery. Blood conservation is essential for the care of surgical patients. He is working to optimise each step of the patient pathway and investigating how tranexamic acid is best delivered to reduce intra-operative blood loss. This work is a collaboration with Professor Mike Murphy from the NHS Blood and Transplant Unit.

2) Understanding how activity levels influence joint injury and osteoarthritis. This research compares the joint structure and function of elite athletes with general population cohorts. He is investigating the effect of physical activity and exploring interventions that may prevent injury and osteoarthritis. This research is in collaboration with Southampton Football Club.

3) Musculoskeletal MRI for detecting early osteoarthritis. Novel MRI sequences are able to provide information on the biochemical composition of joint structures. He is working on the clinical translation of these imaging techniques to facilitate development of new treatment strategies for joint disease. This research is in collaboration with Professor Neal Bangerter at Imperial College, London

Professor Vanessa Ferreira is a British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, and teaches Somerville students as a Clinical Non-Stipendiary Lecturer.

Professor Vanessa Ferreira has expertise in the study of heart disease using cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). Her doctorate research in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford focused on CMR myocardial tissue characterisation, converging with MR physics technical development towards clinical translation of myocardial T1-mapping. Briefly, each tissue type in the body has a magnetic property called T1 relaxation time, which can be measured (in milliseconds) using MRI scans. The heart has a specific range of normal T1 values, deviation from which may be indicative of disease. T1-mapping generates a pixel-by-pixel T1-map of the heart, which can locate small areas of disease in a numerical manner. Thus, T1-mapping provides a quantitative way to examine the heart, does not require any injection of contrast agents or radiation, and produces coloured MRI images which give additional information compared to traditional MR images.

One of her goals is to advance CMR methods to gain more insight into heart disease in ways not previously possible, in a non-invasive way. Another is to minimise the need for injection of contrast agents for diagnostic images, allowing more patients to benefit from cardiac MRI, eliminating adverse reactions to contrast agents, and savings in time and cost.

Working with MR physicists, engineers, biomedical imaging experts and clinician-scientists from a range of specialties, Vanessa’s research at the OCMR is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary. Vanessa also delivers CMR education, and supervises DPhil, MSc and medical students in CMR research at the OCMR, based at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

I have specific research interests in the etiology and management of sleep disturbance and the interaction between sleep disturbance and mental health.

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.

Dr Ain Neuhaus is a Specialty Registrar (Resident) in Radiology at Oxford University Hospitals and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College.

Ain matriculated at Somerville in 2009 and completed his medical degree in 2019. During this period, he also intercalated a DPhil in Medical Sciences at St John’s College, Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Alastair Buchan and Prof. Daniel Anthony, investigating blood flow regulation in the brain.

Ain’s ongoing research focuses on imaging in acute stroke, in particular how to use computed tomography for optimal selection of patients for clot retrieval treatment (endovascular thrombectomy) and predicting long-term outcome after stroke. He also has an active interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how these techniques can be applied to image analysis in radiology.

My research interests are in cardiac metabolism and how this can be imaged using advanced cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) techniques. I am interested in understanding how the heart produces and uses energy to pump and how this becomes deranged in heart failure.

My previous work has focused on the metabolic derangement induced by the chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin in a rodent model of cardiotoxicity, showing early derangements in myocardial energetics which precede overt systolic dysfunction. More recently I have investigated the ability of novel therapeutic agents to alter myocardial metabolism in the setting of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). I have also used advanced CMR to define the novel cardiovascular phenotype of inflammatory conditions such as IgG4 related disease and to assess changes in cardiac remodelling which occur following bariatric surgery. I am project lead on JeFF: Jersey Fighting Failure which seeks to revolutionise heart failure care on Jersey and has been selected as pilot project for the British Society of Heart Failure’s 25 in 25 initiative. 

I also have experience of large-scale clinical trials through my involvement as a research assistant on the ChAdOx-1 COVID-19 vaccine trials. I also have experience working with large databases such as QResearch.

Background

I am an Academic Clinical Fellow in Cardiology at Oxford University Hospitals and an Honorary Research Fellow at Jersey General Hospital. I am also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College, University of Oxford, where I was an undergraduate student. Outside clinical, research and teaching activities I have a keen interest in rugby union, having gained 4 Rugby Blues at Oxford and played in the Universities World Cup in Japan in 2019.

Before coming to Oxford, I worked in the Information Management Group, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

I got my PhD from the University of Karlsruhe under supervision of Prof. Rudi Studer. While in Karlsruhe, Germany, I was employed at the Research Center for Information Technologies (FZI). I have worked with companies including EDF and Samsung.

I am interested in developing algorithms and techniques necessary for realizing advanced applications in the Semantic Web. In the past, my research is focused around the ontology language OWL. More recently, I became interested in applying ontology techniques to data management problems in databases and big data. Specifically, I am investigating ways in using variants of datalog — a language at the intersection of logic programming and databases — to represent and access data, and I am studying the related theoretical and practical problems, such as efficient evaluation of datalog programs and efficient maintenance of datalog materialisations. My research involves the development of tools that demonstrates the techniques I am working on.

You can view a complete list of my publications with downloadable papers here.

Awards

• Distinguished Paper at the 2017 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence for the paper “Foundations of Declarative Data Analysis Using Limit Datalog Programs”
• Best Applications Paper at the 2016 International Semantic Web Conference for the paper “Semantic Technologies for Data Analysis in Health Care”
• The 2013 Roger Needham award by the British Computer Society (BCS) for “a distinguished research contribution in computer science”
• Selected as one of “2008 AI’s 10 to Watch” by the IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine
• The 2007 Cor Baayen award by the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) for “a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics”
• Best Paper at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference for the paper “On the Properties of Metamodeling in OWL”

Oliver graduated with a first-class degree in Medicine from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

During his medical studies, Oliver was involved in numerous research projects, studying the effects of neurotrophic growth factors at the University of Helsinki and the binding properties of a stimulant substance methcathinone on dopamine receptors at the University of Tartu.

In 2015 he took a year off of his medical studies to come to the University of Oxford and examine the role of D1/D2-like and 5-HT2C receptors on goal-directed actions, funded by the Archimedes Fund from Estonia.

Oliver is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford as a member of the Sharott Group and the Walton Group (Experimental Psychology). His research focuses on the role of the projection from prefrontal cortex to the dorsomedial striatum in co-ordinating motivated action, with a particular focus of elucidating the circuit disruptions leading to poverty of movement in Parkinson’s disease. He aims to use these experiments to develop closed-loop deep brain stimulation approaches for the treatment of motivational deficits.

I am a research scientist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology (University of Oxford, UK).

I currently supervise a small team and we study the interactions of different Neisseria species and the specific mechanisms by which bacteria colonise the human body. I also teach microbiology to undergraduate medical students and am involved in science outreach activities to inspire and engage local primary school children.

Alongside this, I am also a member of the Microbiology Society’s Communications Committee and a representative on the Microbiology in Schools Advisory Committee (MiSAC).

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

Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM)

Professor Alison Wolf CBE is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at Kings College London, and a cross-bench peer (Baroness Wolf of Dulwich) in the House of Lords.

She specialises in the relationship between education and the labour market. She has a particular interest in training and skills policy, universities, and the medical workforce. The latter is particularly appropriate to the Chair she holds, established in memory of an influential government adviser on medical management. Alison’s publications include The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society (Profile Books 2013) and Remaking Tertiary Education (Resolution Foundation 2016).

Alison is highly involved in policy debate, both in this country and more widely and is currently seconded part-time to the government as an expert adviser on skills policy. In February 2018, she was appointed to the English Government’s Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, as a member of the independent expert panel. The report of the panel (‘the ‘Augar Review’) was published in 2019: the government has published an interim response, accepting some of the key recommendations.  In 2019 Alison delivered the annual King’s lectures, on ‘Universities. the economy and the state’.  She has been a specialist adviser to the House of Commons select committee on education and skills; writes widely for the national press and is a presenter for Analysis on BBC Radio 4; and in March 2011 completed the The Wolf Review, written by Professor Wolf, a Review of Vocational Education for the Secretary of State for Education.  In 2015/16 she was a member of the independent panel on technical education, chaired by Lord David Sainsbury, whose report formed the basis of the Government’s 2016 Skills Plan.

While most of Alison’s current work focuses on the interface between education institutions and labour markets, she also has long-standing interests in assessment, and in mathematics education. She was the founding Chair of Governors of the King’s College London Mathematics School, established by King’s College London. Alison was awarded the 2008 Sam Aaronovitch memorial prize for her article in Local Economy on the Leitch Review of Skills. She has been an adviser to, among others, the OECD, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Ministries of Education of New Zealand, France and South Africa, the European Commission, the International Accounting Education Standards Board, and the Bar Council. She was educated at the universities of Oxford (MA, MPhil) and Neuchatel.

Alison spent her early career in the United States working as a policy analyst for the federal government, and spent many years at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she is a visiting professor. Alison was awarded the CBE for services to education in the Queen’s 2012 birthday honours.

In 2014 Baroness Vadera was appointed as the first woman to chair a major UK bank.

Her move to Santander follows a remarkable career that has seen her at the heart of banking, business and politics in the UK and abroad. We asked her about the global financial crisis, trouble in the Eurozone, the outlook for women in the workplace and the lessons she learnt from an exceptional childhood.

Kiri Te Kanawa is a New Zealand lyric soprano best known for her repertoire of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss.

After leaving school, she won various singing competitions in New Zealand and Australia, and in 1966, after a period as a popular singer and recording artist, she became a student at the London Opera Centre.

As a soprano, Te Kanawa shot to stardom in the 1970s with a series of appearances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, and the enthusiastic support of conductors such as Colin Davis and Georg Solti. Her first big success was as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1971. That was followed by a run of Mozart operas and, among others, a production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème in which she sang Mimi. Her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1974 as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello was widely acclaimed. In 1981 she sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and her rendering of George Frideric Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim” reached a worldwide television audience of more than 600 million. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1982. She received similar honours in Australia (1990) and New Zealand (1995).

In addition to singing in a great number of opera recordings, Te Kanawa produced a number of popular recordings, including such works as Kiri Sings Gershwin (1987), Kiri Sings Porter (1994), Kiri Sings Berlin (1998), and Maori Songs (1999).

Although in 2002 she began to scale back her appearances on the opera stage, she actively continued to perform concerts and recitals in connection with the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation (2004), whose mission it is to provide support and financial aid to struggling singers and musicians of New Zealand. In August 2009 Te Kanawa announced that she would fully retire from opera the following year. However, she continued to sing in public until 2016, when she performed her last concert. During this time she played Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in an episode (2013) of the TV series Downton Abbey.