Emeritus, Honorary and Foundation Fellows

Savy is reading for the MSc in Law and Finance offered jointly by the Faculty of Law and the Saïd Business School. He graduated from the National Law University, Delhi in 2015 and previously worked with an international law firm in London. Savy is admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India.

Our world today is increasingly introspecting the role of the corporation. While it remains to be seen whether the shift towards stakeholder capitalism by the 2019 Business Roundtable was just empty rhetoric, socio-economic inequalities continue to widen further. I am keen to explore the economic interests underpinning corporate decision-making, the financial tools used to evaluate corporate success and the balancing of legal relations of the corporation with its stakeholders.

The Oxford India Centre and the Zaiwalla scholarship have given me the incredible opportunity to study while at Somerville College for which I am grateful. I am keen to immerse myself in the programme with the hope that I can meaningfully contribute to the above-mentioned issues which I believe will come to define my generation.

My doctoral research is about assessing the impacts of climate change and local land-use land-cover changes on birds of eastern Indian Himalaya, a global biodiversity hotspot. My study site in Arunachal Pradesh is home to Idu-Mishmis, the indigenous people of Dibang Valley.

I completed my masters in Environment Science and Technology with the highest grades from Bharati Vidyapeeth Institute of Environment Education and Research, Pune (India) in 2017 where I studied the effects of urban noise on acoustic communication of Myna species for my dissertation. After my masters, I investigated the effects of land-use change on bird communities in extremely remote community forests and tropical forests in Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, a state in Northeast India which lies in the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. I then worked as a junior researcher for a year under the National Mission for Himalayan Studies scheme with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India, where I intensively documented the utilization and consumption of insects by tribes of three Northeast Indian states- Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

Large-scale deforestation for pro-development projects, diversion of primary forests, hunting, climate change, unsustainable harvesting of forest resources etc. are expected to push many species to extinction, while triggering newer coping mechanisms in some. My research interest broadly revolves around understanding which birds adapt well to such events and which do not. Dibang Valley, in particular, is undergoing massive changes due to ongoing anthropogenic activities which are expected to have negative impacts on birds, most of which remain undiscovered or understudied. While in Dibang Valley, I also intend to document people-bird interactions, their stories and relevance of bird species in Idu-Mishmi culture.

Through an international platform and generous support provided by OICSD, I intend to contribute more to both scientific and social research in Northeast India, a region which remains largely unexplored even today.

Mrinalini is passionate about art history, visual culture, and urban architecture. During her time at Oxford, she proposes to study the role of Mughal gardens as landscapes and settings in miniature paintings. More specifically, she is interested in examining Mughal gardens as places of production and storing wealth and not merely aesthetic environments. 

Mrinalini graduated from Denison University with honours (Magna Cum Laude) and as a Phi Beta Kappa member in 2020. As a Classicist, she has spent hours tracing the cultural consciousness of ancient communities by studying their art, architecture and philosophy; exploring the processes of identification and reification that produce the imagined landscape of cities (such as Athens and Rome) as locations of culture, history, and memory of communities. The interdisciplinary nature of her liberal arts education allowed her to undertake summer-long research as a Woodyard Scholar in the city of Ayodhya in India, which sparked her interest in urban architecture in South Asia. 

Mrinalini is also a recipient of the Davis Projects for Peace Prize and runs her non-profit organisation, Panthalassa that works in women healthcare, education, and sustainable energy alternatives. 

During my DPhil at Oxford Biochemistry, I will work on understanding the evolution of bacteria under antibiotic stress. I strive to answer the questions related to single-cell heterogeneity in stress adaptations which enables bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance by exploring the importance of stochastic noise and fluctuations in these processes.

I completed my undergraduate degree, majoring in Chemical Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi (2016-2020). During my undergraduate years, I stepped into the field of synthetic biology through institute iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine) team and subsequently, worked on an array of different projects. With the Kusuma School of biology-IIT Delhi, I worked on building computational algorithms for genomic analysis of G-Quaruplexes and Vitamin D receptor elements under Dr V. Perumal.

Outside my institute, I was fortunate to be selected as an undergraduate researcher at Harvard SEAS (Khorana Scholar 2018, summer 2018), Harvard Medical School (summer 2019) and Australian National University (Future Research Talent Travel Award 2019, winter 2019). In these projects, I explored the single-cell and genome studies using image analysis and building computational algorithms. I was fascinated by the link between biology and engineering/mathematics, which made me curious to view the cell regulation behaviour with a quantitative lens which, otherwise, has mostly been analyzed qualitatively.

Antibiotics are continuously being challenged by microorganisms all around the world, potentially overpowering the drugs by developing resistance against them. The advent of super-resolution microscopy and single-cell analysis has brought us a step closer in analyzing the root cause of increasing antibiotic resistance in micro-organisms. It is especially important in India, where the extensive, as well as ill use of antibiotics and lack of Point-Of-Care diagnostics, has led to people losing lives due to septicemia at a larger scale. Developing engineering approaches to study “How cells sense the environment and regulate this antibiotic stress at the single-cell level” would help me address this issue.

I am grateful to be a part of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) community. It will provide me with a platform to understand the interdisciplinary links between scientific research advancements and better healthcare, thus touching people’s lives.

Gaurav is undertaking a DPhil research at the intersection of electric mobility and climate policy. His work looks at the political economy of transition to electric mobility in India. The research aim is to understand how various factors and entities related to the wider political economy of urban transport have led to the creation and shaping of various policies in respect of electric vehicles in India in the past 10 years.  

Gaurav is an urban and transport planner with over 8 years of experience of working on urban mobility issues in India in a variety of roles ranging from consulting to research and advocacy. Prior to starting his DPhil, he was leading the programme on sustainable mobility for Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. He’s earlier also worked with Indian School of Business (ISB) and Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS). 

He holds an undergraduate degree in urban planning from School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and an MSc in Transport Planning and Environment from Newcastle University, UK, for which he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship. 

Apoorva is an ecologist, primarily interested in all aspects of human-animal interactions and applied conservation. Her DPhil research draws from interdisciplinary fields of natural and social sciences to investigate farmer-wildlife conflict and co-existence, crop losses and livelihood interventions in transitional forest landscapes. Her research is based out of the Central Western Ghats of Karnataka, India, alongside the marginal farmers of Indo-African Siddi community, local NGOs and government stakeholders. Her study adopts the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 Zero Hunger and Goal 15 Life on Land.

She is currently an associate at the Linnean Society of London, an honorary member of the Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) Consortium and a steering committee member of the IUCN SSC Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group. Her past work includes community-based species conservation, animal movement ecology, bioacoustics studies and documenting traditional ecological knowledge, both in terrestrial as well as marine realms.

Apoorva holds a Masters in Ecology (2013) from Pondicherry University and is the second Indian woman to have received the Global Fellowship in Marine Conservation by Duke University. For her Master’s research, she was funded by the International Otter Survival Fund (IOSF) to study the conflict situation between Smooth-coated otters and fishermen, and associated socio-economics in the Cauvery River, India. After her Masters and stint at Duke, she received a follow-up grant by Oak Foundation to collaborate with Conservation International, Brazil and founded the Marine Conservation without Borders initiative with her colleagues at Bahia, Brazil.

On returning to India, Apoorva worked as a Research Associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) on the India Biodiversity Portal project. She then went on to work as a Research Assistant at the University of Lethbridge, Canada for a year to study the acoustic communication of the endemic Adelaide’s warbler in Puerto Rico. On her return, she found the need to facilitate field research in India, engage local communities and children in field ecology studies, and thus began the Curious Naturalists Initiative in the Western Ghats. She also collaborates as a research affiliate with the Wildlife Information Liaison Development (WILD) Society in India.

Alongside research, Apoorva is also an active participant at policy based global forums such as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity- Conference of the Parties (UN CBD-COP) and Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) COP representing youth and indigenous communities for wildlife conservation. She is also a trained Natural History Illustrator and sketches the wonders of nature, which inspire her to keep going in the midst of all the socio-ecological crisis.

After finishing an MSc at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford University, and an MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, both with distinctions, I am now pursuing a DPhil in International Development.

I was awarded Somerville’s 2017 Principal’s Prize for academic excellence. My Masters at Oxford was funded by the Louis Dreyfus-Weidenfeld scholarship, while the MPhil-Dphil is supported by the university’s Indira Gandhi scholarship.

Prior to this, I worked for over 7 years as a journalist with a leading national newspaper The Hindu in Bangalore. I reported on topics ranging from higher education, technology and finance to more specialized focus areas such as the state of labour, work and wages of the vast urban working class in India. My occasional stints with reporting in rural areas got me interested in contemporary development theory. After this academic stint, I intend to return to the field of journalism with grounding and expertise in development studies. As a development expert, with the experience and know-how of mainstream journalism, I hope to be able to make vital interventions. My long-term goal is to be able to lead a team that can steer the agenda on development reporting, both in terms of grassroots reportage and incisive commentary.

My DPhil research focusses on the political economy of social protection programmes in India. It interrogates whether social sector schemes can ‘transform’ the social relations of production in village societies, and probes the determinants of such transformation. My research takes a comparative political economy approach to understanding transformative processes in rural India.

Young Chan Kim is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow, Principal Investigator, Director of Graduate Studies (Paediatrics), Research Fellow at Wolfson College, and NHS doctor.

He obtained a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, followed by medical degrees (BMBS, BMedSci, and MRes) at the University of Nottingham. After few years in clinical training, he came to Somerville College to pursue a DPhil in Clinical Medicine. His DPhil research focused on vaccine development against arthropod-borne viruses, supported by Innovate UK funding. For his overall performance during his doctorate at the Nuffield Department of Medicine (NDM), he was awarded the highly prestigious NDM Graduate Student Prize 2020 (Overall Prize Winner).

In 2021, he received an NIHR Oxford BRC grant for his postdoctoral research and was elected Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Wolfson College. That same year, he joined the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, leading projects on enteric fever (typhoid and paratyphoid) and Q fever.

In 2022, he was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship to establish his independent research programme on vaccines and therapeutics against arboviruses. Between 2022 and 2023, he also secured MRC HIC-VAC and MRC IAA grants to develop serological assays for enteric fever, as well as MLSTF and MRC IAA grants to develop a novel vaccine against Chagas disease.

After successfully securing three SBRI Innovate UK awards in 2023, he began leading a team of postdoctoral researchers, research assistants, and students working on vaccines against plague, Q fever, and alphaviruses, while also overseeing Paratyphoid and C. difficile human challenge studies with Prof Sir Andrew Pollard. In the same year, he was elected Research Fellow (RF) at Wolfson College. Since 2024, he has served as Deputy Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Paediatrics, before becoming Director of Graduate Studies in 2025, providing academic leadership and oversight of graduate student supervision. 

In 2025, he received MRC IAA and two BactiVac grants to evaluate the efficacy of viral-vectored and mRNA vaccines against Chagas disease, plague and Q-fever. He is also a Co-Investigator on the large Wellcome-funded “Correlates of Protection against Paratyphoid (COP-PT)” programme led by Prof Pollard.

His research integrates translational vaccinology, controlled human infection models, and immunological correlates of protection to accelerate vaccine development for neglected and emerging infectious diseases.

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!!).

Some chemotherapeutic agents, such as doxorubicin, have severe cardiotoxic side effects, which can lead to congestive heart failure in 5% of patients.

There are currently no imaging techniques available to detect patients before the onset of functional decline and there are no specific cardio-protective drugs. My research focuses on both the early detection of cardiotoxicity using the novel metabolic imaging technique, hyperpolarized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the repurposing of existing drugs that target cardiac metabolism as potential cardio-protective therapy. 

Before I came to the UK I trained as a vet at the Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany). I then undertook an MRes in “In Vivo Imaging in Biology and Medicine” and a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. During my PhD in Prof Kevin Brindle’s laboratory I used hyperpolarized MRI to assess tumour metabolism and redox state in mouse models of cancer. I was then awarded a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Immediate Postdoctoral Basic Science Research Fellowship to move to the Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG) at the University of Oxford. During my time in Prof Damian Tyler’s lab at DPAG I established a clinically-relevant rat model of doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity and found that hyperpolarized MRI can detect early changes in cardiac mitochondrial metabolism that precede functional decline. I am now in the process of testing existing drugs that boost mitochondrial metabolism and have some early encouraging data that shows prevention of functional decline with this approach in rats treated wit doxorubicin. 

In addition to my role as Career Development Fellow at the Department of Pharmacology, I am also the Isobel Laing Career Development Fellow in Medical Sciences at Oriel college. This involves tutorial teaching in metabolism for first year Medical and Biomedical Sciences students. I am furthermore a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College (since 2017), where I conduct tutorials in the ‘Organisation of the Body’ course for first year medics, for whom I am also personal tutor. In addition I offer FHS tutorials in cancer metabolism and I act as College Adviser to graduate students in Medical Sciences. In the past I was a Lecturer in Metabolism at Corpus Christi College (2016-2020). I am passionate about disseminating research to the wider public and have thus taken part in outreach events such as ‘Pint of Science’ and ‘FameLab’ as well as events organised by the BHF and Somerville College.

Vicky was born in London to Hungarian-born parents. She was educated at South Hampstead High School, one of the Girls’ Day School Trust group of schools. She read History at Somerville, matriculating in 1974.

At Somerville she was active in the JCR, serving as Treasurer. Both the GDST and Somerville celebrated their centenaries shortly after she completed her time with them, reminding her of the importance of the campaign for equal access to education.

She subsequently qualified as a solicitor and practised first commercial and consumer law, and subsequently charity, trust and probate law.

Vicky’s passion is for education at all levels, both for what it can contribute to society and civic life, and for its enrichment of each individual life. 

As part of that commitment, she served from 1995 to 2007 on the Council of the Girls’ Day School Trust, which is the largest group of independent schools in the UK, comprising 25 schools educating nearly 20,000 students aged 4 to 18 throughout England and Wales. Vicky also trained and worked as an adult literacy teacher in West London.

From 1985 to 1988 Vicky lived in Geneva, where she represented an NGO at the UN and its member organisations.

Vicky and her husband Colin returned permanently to Geneva in 2008. From 2008 to 2014 she was on the Board of the International School of Geneva. She has a daughter and a Somervillian son. She is happy to have shared with all her family her love of literature and the dramatic arts.

https://www.ntfcf.org.hk

Matt leads Somerville’s Communications team.

Matt manages Somerville’s social media presence and website, as well as working on the team’s regular publications and reporting on College life and research. 

Ian is responsible for Battels and Cashbook. He works Tuesday-Friday.

Victoria manages the processes for awarding scholarships and funding to students.

This includes administering grants for travel, personal development, sport and music, as well as academic prizes and scholarships. She co-ordinates the selection process for graduate and undergraduate scholarships, including the Thatcher Scholarships and Oxford India Centre Scholarships. Victoria is also Secretary to the MTST Committee, the OICSD Management Committee and the Travel and Special Project Grants Committee.

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

Before taking up this post in May 2010, Matthew worked in both Keble and Queen’s College Libraries, and is responsible for shelving, book processing and general library tasks.

He can usually be found at the service desk in the loggia, and if you have any issues with finding books or understanding the layout, classification or Library systems, he will be more than happy to help.

Any queries can also be emailed to library.assistant@some.ox.ac.uk.

Saphire oversees the provision of service and support to the College’s academic staff and graduate students.

Saphire manages teaching support (college exams, TMS system, Tutor payments etc), provides support to the Senior Tutor in the recruitment of academic staff, and works closely with the Undergraduate Officer and others in the Academic Office on student administration.

Saphire is also responsible for all areas of the graduate admissions process and support for current graduates.

Salome manages all aspects of HR for academic and support staff including policies, reporting, recruitment, appointments and compliance. Any HR queries can be directed to human.resources@some.ox.ac.uk

HR hours are Monday – Friday 8.00 a.m. – 4.00 p.m. and either Salome or her colleague, Sarah, will be happy to help with any HR questions you have.