Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Dame Julia Stretton Higgins, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology at Imperial College London.

Higgins was the former chair (1998–2003) of the Athena Project, which aims for the advancement of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) in Higher Education. She is now the Patron of the Athena Swan Awards Scheme. Between 2003 and 2007, she was chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Higgins was president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers 2002–3, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 2003–4. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was its Foreign Secretary 2001–6. She was Chair of the Royal Society’s State of the Nation Report Steering Group. Most recently she chaired Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME). (2008-2012) She currently Chairs the Royal Society project (funded by BIS) on increasing diversity in the scientific workforce

She is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the City and Guilds of London Institute, of which she is also Vice-President. She is also an honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Somerville College, Oxford. She was awarded a CBE in 1996 before being named a dame in the 2001 Queen’s Birthday Honours list.She holds honorary degrees from a number of UK Universities ans also from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Her scientific work has concentrated on the investigation of polymers with neutron scattering. She co-authored a monograph on that field (Higgins & Benoit 1997). In 1999, she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. She was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She is a Chevalier de la Legion D’Honneur

Jenny Pickworth is a protein crystallographer who worked in Dorothy Hodgkin’s lab, where her work on the hexacarboxylic acid derivative of vitamin B12 revealed the structure of the corrin ring. 

At the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia where she was first a member of Lindo Patterson’s lab and later a principal investigator, she continued her interest in B12 structures.  Her research focus has included small-molecule structures related to cancer; the structural aspects of the Krebs cycle and citrates; metal-ion coordination in proteins; the interaction of ligands with metal ions; and the enzymes aconitase and xylose isomerase.  She is the recipient of many awards, notably the Fankuchen Award of the ACA and the Garvan Medal of the American Chemical Society.  Her many professional contributions include serving as President of the ACA in 1979 and as editor of Acta Crystallographica D (macromolecules).

One of Dr. Glusker’s major interests is crystallography education; the 3rd edition of the popular textbook Crystal Structure Analysis: A Primer by Glusker & Trueblood appeared in 2010.  She is the co-author or co-editor of a number of books on crystallography and the history of crystallography.

Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, England on 23 April 1937.

She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages, and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974. Victoria Glendinning is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN and was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. She is also a regular contributor of articles and reviews to various newspapers and magazines.

Her acclaimed biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, published in 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987). Both Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) andTrollope (1992) won the Whitbread Biography Award. Her latest biography is Raffles and the Golden Opportunity (2012) on the life of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. 

Victoria Glendinning is the author of three novels: The Grown-Ups (1989), the story of Leo Ulm, author, pundit and academic; Electricity (1995), the story of a Victorian girl embroiled in new experiences and a new technology; and Flight (2002), a novel of passion and betrayal set in the world of international business.

In 2009, Love’s Civil War, the co-edited letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, was published.

Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE was born in 1933 in the beautiful fraught once-island city of Derry, Northern Ireland, and brought up there, together with several magical years during the war in Donegal.

She had her education at the little Ballymore First School in County Donegal, Londonderry High School, Mount (Quaker) School York, then first class honours in Classics (Literae humaniores) and a doctorate in Anthropology at Oxford. This was followed by fieldwork and university teaching in Africa, principally Sierra Leone and Nigeria. She then joined the pioneering Open University as a founding member of the academic staff, where she spent the rest of her career apart from three years – and more fieldwork – at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and is now, proudly, an Open University Emeritus Professor. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, and is also an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford. She has three daughters and five grandchildren and lives in Old Bletchley, southern England, with her husband of over 50 years. There she runs her small publishing business, Callender Press, founded to publish her parents’ writing, and in great happiness continues her research and writing, including her dream-led venture into novels and filmscripts –   unexpected but somehow informed by her anthropology. Her series Hearing Others’ Voices is published by Balestier Press. 

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.

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.

Dame Elan Closs Stephens (1966, English) is a Welsh educator and policy-maker for broadcasting and the arts.

She has served as a Governor of the British Film Institute, commissioner of the Electoral Commission for Wales, and is currently the BBC Board member for Wales. In January 2020, she was appointed Pro Chancellor of Aberystwyth University.

She was honoured with a CBE in 2001 for her services to broadcasting and to the Welsh Language, and made a Dame in 2019 for her services to the Welsh government and to broadcasting. She was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2020.

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.

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.

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.

Professor Caroline Barron is a medieval historian whose research centres on the late medieval period in Britain.

She served as President of the London and Middlesex Archaelogical Society from 2008-2011 and as President of the British Association for Local History since 2016. She is also a former President of the Somerville Association.

She was appointed OBE in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to education.

Irangani Abeysekera is a former Sri Lankan ambassador.

After reading Modern History at Somerville, she became her country’s first female career diplomat, serving in the UK, Thailand and Germany.

Professor Vincent’s (FRS FMedSci) major research interest is in the role of autoimmunity in neurological diseases, mainly auto-antibody mediated ion channel and receptor disorders.

These rare conditions are now recognised world-wide, diagnosed with tests she helped to develop, and treated with drugs that reduce the levels of the antibodies, with very good clinical responses.

She was previously honorary consultant in immunology and founded the Oxford Clinical Neuroimmunology service, an international referral centre for the measurement of antibodies in neurological diseases, that she led for 24 years. She was formerly Head of Department of Clinical Neurology (2005-2008), President of the International Society of Neuroimmunology (2001-2004), and an Associate Editor of the journal Brain (2004-2013). She formally retired in 2016 but has continued to publish with collaborators in the UK and abroad (total >400). She has received many national and international awards for her work.

Professor Pulman’s research interests are in computational linguistics: the development of computer programs that behave as if they understood English. He is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, and is currently a senior researcher at Apple, working on Siri.

Carole Jordan’s career has centred on the use of x-ray and UV spectra as plasma diagnostics.

She was a pioneer of the calculations required to determine the relative number densities of elements in different stages of ionization. As her career progressed she became heavily involved with observations of stellar spectra, especially ones obtained from space platforms such as the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout her career she worked on the interpretation of solar spectra. In both solar and stellar areas, she was the first to identify the atomic or molecular origins of many emission lines, including molecular fluorescence in cool giants that has revealed the inhomogeneous structure of their chromospheres.

Later, she transferred her solar techniques to the analysis of the spectra of cool stars.

The broadening of emission lines in both dwarf and giant stars exceeds that expected from the local kinetic temperature. In dwarf stars she has interpreted this broadening as being associated with the passage of magnetohydrodynamic waves through the outer atmosphere, which go on to heat the corona. Such waves can originate from magnetic field motions, or through magnetic reconnection, at low levels of the outer atmosphere. 

To test proposed theories she has developed techniques to determine from spectra the temperature of the plasma as a function of height and has applied these to the Sun and many cool stars. She has an international reputation as an authority on the coronae of the Sun and cool stars. 

Throughout her career Carole has been active in the research community. She has been an editor of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Solar Physics, and The Observatory.

She was a member of the Councils of both SERC and PPARC, and under SERC, Chair of the Solar System Committee. She has served twice on the Council of the IOP and was its first Vice-President, Science. She was a Secretary and then the first female President of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

She is valued for her hard work and forthright, no-nonsense approach to people and problems, her honesty, and her total commitment to science.

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey CBE FBA FRHistS is a British medieval historian.

She was the joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize in 1993 for her book Living and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience, which examines the lives of monks at Westminster Abbey, one of England’s greatest medieval monasteries. In 1982 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Karin Erdmann is a German mathematician specializing in representation theory (especially modular representation theory) and homological algebra (especially Hochschild cohomology).

She is best known for her work in modular representation theory which has been cited over 1500 times according to the Mathematical Reviews. Her nephew Martin Erdmann is professor for experimental particle physics at the RWTH Aachen University.

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.