Fellows and Academics

Matthew Wood is Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Head of the Medical Sciences Division (http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/support-services/matthew-wood) in the University of Oxford. His laboratory is based in the Department of Paediatrics.

Matthew graduated in Medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1987, working in clinical Neuroscience before gaining a doctorate in Physiological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 1993. His research team works on developing gene therapies for degenerative disorders of the brain and muscles – so-called neuromuscular diseases. This is exemplified by landmark work using small DNA patches called oligonucleotides to correct the genetic abnormalities underlying the fatal childhood muscle disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Further information is available at Professor Wood’s page with the Oxford Neuroscience and Department of Paediatrics.

Faridah Zaman is Associate Professor of the History of Britain and the World at the University of Oxford, and Tutor of Modern History at Somerville College.

After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago from 2015-2018.

Dr Zaman is a historian of the modern British Empire, South Asia and global intellectual history.

Currently, she has two main areas of research. The first is a study of Muslim political activists, religious scholars, journalists and poets in early twentieth century British India. She situates developments in the thought of these figures within a history of worldwide war, political revolution and imperial decline.

The second research area concerns history as an academic discipline in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and its relationship to the expansion and legitimisation of empire. To date, she has also written on memory and nostalgia, heritage and imperial visual culture and political visions of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Academic Biography:

2015-2018 Dorothy and Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Chicago

2010-2014 PhD in History, University of Cambridge

2009-2010 MPhil in Historical Studies, University of Cambridge

2006-2009 BA in History, University of Cambridge

I am a postdoctoral research assistant at the theoretical physics department of the University of Oxford. I work in the field of theoretical particle physics, the aim of which is understanding the final fundamental law of nature. In particular, my research is focussed on precision phenomenology for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

I am an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). At Somerville College, I teach French Language, Translation, Orals and Essay.

I have been teaching French ‘language cafés’ and French ‘research-based language tutorials’ at the University of Birmingham since 2020. I have also been an English academic language tutor at AWAS (Academic Writing Advisory Service) for the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham since 2021. 

Research

My research interests revolve around colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa and the literary productions that emanate from these encounters. My PhD in French and Francophone Studies reads Algerian identity from the prism of the Sahara. It posits the Sahara Desert as an accurate analytical prism through which we can understand complex paradigms related to cultural identities in Algeria, and North Africa in general. I am interested in researching how colonial encounters in spaces like the Sahara shape and make visible, but also invisible different memories, histories and identities. More broadly, I am interested in 20^th and 21^st-century French and Algerian literatures, and I am currently researching the imprint of imperial legacies on postcolonial societies and how the latter resist but also perpetuate the colonial tropes in literary writing.

Professor Noa Zilberman is a network-hardware researcher, focusing on the integration of micro-level architectures and macro level, large scale networked-systems.

Before joining Oxford, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, she spent close to 15 years in industry, last as a Chip Architect and Engineering Manager at Broadcom.

Rocco is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics and at the Oxford Martin School.

He completed his DPhil at the Oxford Department of International Development. His research focuses on social protection and labour markets. In his current work, he is using experimental and quasi-experimental methods to study the potential to leverage innovations in the design and delivery of social protection systems to increase household resilience to poverty in the context of extreme climate events such as floods and droughts. In the past, he has researched labour markets, inequality, poverty alleviation, poverty dynamics, and social stratification, using a variety of methods, including longitudinal surveys, field experiments, qualitative studies, and behavioural lab experiments.