Fellows and Academics

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.

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.

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 an Associate 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.

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. 

Professor Southerden’s main area of research is in medieval Italian literature, particularly the works of Dante and Petrarch, and the relationship between language and desire in 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. Her thesis considered the modern poet Vittorio Sereni’s relationship to the preceding lyric tradition and his reframing of a discourse of desire that goes back to Dante and Petrarch. 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). She was made a full professor of the university in the 2023 Recognition of Distinction.

Research

Francesca Southerden’s research focuses on the relationship between language and desire in the works of Dante and Petrarch. Her current book, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (forthcoming with Legenda), 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 is interested in the relationship between literature and critical theory, and in the concept of lyric from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Teaching

Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature. She is interested in hearing from graduate students who would like to work on thirteenth- or fourteenth century Italian literature and culture, especially Dante, Petrarch and the early lyric tradition. She is also happy to supervise projects with an interdisciplinary focus within medieval Italian literature.

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.

Charles Spence is Somerville’s Fellow and Tutor in Experimental Psychology, and the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory.

He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His work calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.

Over the years, Charles has consulted for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design, packaging, and branding. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the Crew Work Station on the European Space Shuttle. Charles and his group are currently working on problems associated with the design of foods that maximally stimulate the senses (together with Heston Blumenthal, chef of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray). His group also has a very active line of research on the design of auditory, tactile, and multisensory warning signals for drivers and other interface operators (together with Toyota). Charles is also interested in the effect of the indoor environment on mood, well-being, and performance (together with ICI).

Charles has published over 500 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last 15 years. Charles has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, not to mention the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition, for his groundbreaking work on the ‘sonic crisp’!