People

Professor Lahiri’s interests are in phonology, phonetics, historical and comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. She is also the Director of the University’s pioneering Language and Brain Lab.

Her work combines theoretical and experimental approaches to answer questions such as why sound alternations exist between different forms of one and the same word and how such words are represented in the mental lexicon, how words change over time, and how they are processed in the brain.

Recent advances from her team include the development of a cutting-edge flexible speech recognition system, Flex-SR. The technology was used to create a mobile phone app to help second language learners improve their pronunciation by analysing words and sentences spoken into the app and giving specific personal feedback. Her leadership on the project was recognised by the University with a Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation Award in 2018.

The first Indian woman to hold a professorial chair at Oxford, she helped to found Oxford University’s Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics. She served as its inaugural Chair in 2008, and returned to the role for a second term in 2019. In the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours, she was made a CBE in recognition of her services to the study of Linguistics.

In 2010, she was eleted a fellow of the British Academy, and currently serves as Vice President (Humanities) for the body. She has also been elected a member of the Academia Europaea and an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America. She is Principal Investigator on European Research Council grants, as well as two Arts and Humanities Research Council grants, including one for a project involving Somerville Senior Research Fellow Professor Frans Plank.

http://brainlab.clp.ox.ac.uk

http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk

Renaud Lambiotte is a Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems.

His main research interests are the modelling and analysis of large networks, with a particular focus on clustering and temporal networks, and applications in social and neuronal systems. He is Associate Editor for Science Advances and a Turing Fellow. See more here.

Renaud Lambiotte has a PhD in Physics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Following postdocs at ENS Lyon, Université de Liège, UCLouvain and Imperial College London, and a Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Namur, he is currently Professor of Networks and Nonlinear Systems at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.

Hannie Lawlor holds a BA and MSt in Spanish and French from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and completed her DPhil on twenty-first-century Spanish and French women’s writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, under the supervision of Dr Daniela Omlor and Professor Marie-Chantal Killeen. Prior to taking up her current post at LMH and Somerville, she held stipendiary and departmental lecturer posts in Spanish at Oxford and was Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin.

Research Interests

Hannie’s research focuses primarily on women’s autobiographical practices in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. She is particularly interested in comparative approaches, whether it be considering works across languages and cultures or across media. Her first monograph, Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing, analysed intergenerational responses to traumatic loss and her current project builds on these findings to explore what she defines as the impossible conversation as a crucial mode of narrative transmission.

Teaching

Hannie teaches the full Prelims course for students in Spanish at LMH and Somerville College and convenes Introduction to Spanish Film (XI) for students of Spanish Sole. For FHS, she teaches peninsular options in literature and film for the modern period paper (VIII) and special authors including Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Federico García Lorca, and Benito Pérez Galdós for Paper XI. She co-teaches Paper XII ‘Women Writers in Modern Spain’ and supervises extended essays (XIV), bridge essays, and master’s theses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s writing, life writing, film, memory, and trauma. She welcomes expressions of interest from prospective PhD candidates working on related modern peninsular topics.

As a former first-generation student from a non-selective state school, Hannie is keenly committed to access and outreach initiatives. She is Schools Liaison representative for the Spanish Sub-Faculty and eager to receive applications from students from schools who do not have a history of sending students to Oxbridge.

Keeper of our college pet! 

Anna Laura Lepschy is Emeritus Professor in Italian at University College London.

After studying at Somerville, she began a career in academia. In 1977 she co-published The Italian Language Today with her husband Giulio Lepschy, a reference book of the structure and grammar of contemporary Italian. She later co-edited a collection of essays titled Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Conor Fahy.

In 1984, Lepschy was appointed a Head of the Italian Department at the University College London and founded the Centre for Italian Studies. While teaching, Lepschy co-edited a book with Verina R. Jones titled With a Pen in Her Hand: Women and Writing in Italy in the Nineteenth Century and beyond. The book was a collection of essays delivered at the Conference on Women and Writing in Nineteenth-Century Italy in February 1997. In 2002, Lepschy co-edited another book titled Multilingualism in Italy, Past and Present with Arturo Tosi.

Lepshy was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the Order of the Star of the Italian Solidarity and, in 2011, the British Academy’s Serena Medal for in recognition of her work.

Freshers president is Ben Liow (benjamin.liow@some.ox.ac.uk) and freshers committee include Francesca Bahadur (francesca.bahadur@some.ox.ac.uk) and Hannah Ruck (hannah.ruck@some.ox.ac.uk) 

Dr. Shiwei Liu is Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Somerville College. He is also a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Oxford. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. with the Cum Laude from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 2022. His research goal is to leverage, understand, and expand the role of low-dimensionality in neural networks, whose impacts span many important topics, such as efficient training/inference/transfer of large-foundation models, robustness and trustworthiness, and generative AI. His current main research interest focuses on improving the efficiency and accessibility of LLMs, making them accessible tooling to everyone. Dr. Liu has received two Rising Star Awards from KAUST and the Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL). His Ph.D. thesis received the 2023 Best Dissertation Award from Informatics Europe. Personal Website: https://shiweiliuiiiiiii.github.io/

Elizabeth is the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford.

She previously studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield, and, following the completion of her doctorate in 2022, she held positions with the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre and the Birmingham Music Education Research Group. At present she is also an external member of the Group for Research in Music Education at Cardiff Metropolitan University, and sits on the advisory panel for the national evaluation of Arts Council England’s Creativity Collaboratives. Elizabeth is the Assistant Editor for the international peer-reviewed journal, Research Studies in Music Education, and the recipient of an Early Career Researcher Career Development Fellowship from the British Educational Research Association.

Elizabeth’s current research focusses on the notion of ‘musical vulnerability’ – our inherent and situational openness to being affected (both positively and negatively) by the properties of music-making. She is working closely alongside music teachers at three secondary schools to understand how musical vulnerability is realised in classroom teaching and learning, and how it can be accounted for through ‘pedagogies of vulnerability’. She is also in the process of developing new resources for equipping pre-service music teachers to respond to experiences of musical vulnerability in diverse settings. Her research intersects with broader issues of inclusion, access, and care in music education, and has led to related projects in areas ranging from community singing to neurodiverse concert audiences.

Starting from my doctoral dissertation on the history of Bulgarian syntax, my research has focused primarily on the delimitation and interaction of various Slavonic vernaculars and the medieval literary language, Church Slavonic. 

My primary data are drawn from the various translations of the Psalter produced up to the fifteenth century, and my investigations touch on the origins of Old Church Slavonic, medieval translation technique, evidence for prosodic and morphosyntactic developments (e.g. in clitic use, word division, tense distinctions, mood and verbal aspect), the principles and practice of textual criticism in application to Church Slavonic material, the palaeography of Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts, and Church Slavonic hymnographical traditions.

My DPhil in Plant Sciences, under the guidance of Professor (Dr.) Renier van der Hoorn, aims to understand the evolution of mechanism of extracellular perception of pathogens in the Solanaceae plant family, including important crops such as, tomato and potato.

Subsequent to perception, plants actively resist infection by most pathogens via deployment of multiple defense pathways. Since plant pathogens pose a huge challenge to crop production, enhanced understanding of how plant disease resistance is achieved will open novel avenues for plant protection methods. This eventually holds the potential of simultaneously addressing the many crises related to agriculture, including, global food security.

I am truly grateful to have received an IGS award, and I hope that OICSD, through inter-disciplinary collaborations, will provide necessary support to translate my research findings into effective solutions to crop losses.

Prior to Oxford, I attended the University of Delhi for my B.Sc. degree in life sciences and M.Sc. in Botany. During my post-graduation, I spent a summer at the Institute of Life Sciences, Odisha, as an Indian Academy of Sciences’ Research Fellow. Over the last few years, I have worked with various Non-governmental organizations in India, working on education and agriculture-related concerns.

Alastair Mallick joined Somerville College as our new Head Gardener in 2022. With 15 years of horticultural experience behind him, across everything from organic farming to his most recent post as Head Gardener at Queen’s College (2017-22), Alastair is keen to build on Somerville’s legacy of sustainability, biodiversity and beauty.

Building on a life-long love for plants and the natural world, Alastair progressed into gardening through a passion for growing his own food. After volunteering on many organic farming projects around the world and spending many hours tending to his allotment, he realised that he loved the process of working with plants. A professional pathway soon followed: Alastair ran his own successful gardening business before, in 2017, taking the jump into the the world of the university as Head Gardener at Queen’s in 2017. Here, he found that he loved the Oxford college environment, and was therefore thrilled when our former Head Gardener Sophie Walwin suggested he consider taking on the excellent work she began during her time at Somerville.

Alastair has big plans for the Somerville gardens. Refeshing the borders, bringing in lots of beautiful and unusual plants to lift Sophie’s great existing planting, adding new structure to the rest of the garden through shrubs and trees – the list goes on. Alastair is also deeply involved in the conversations to create a new pond as a source of additional biodiversity (and potential research for our plant scientists!). Some other plans being considered are a new perennial meadow for the empty bed in front of the Maitland building and an alpine rock garden in front of Park. However, Alastair also has a continued focus on developing garden spaces that are resilient to the pressures of climate change and that work for local fauna as well as for us. This will be achieved through measures such as the pond, but also bird boxes, bee hotels and drought-resistant, locally-sourced planting.

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.

Aaron Maniam is an alumnus of Somerville (PPE 1998) and current Senior Associate, a position equivalent to Senior Research Fellow but for individuals whose contributions lie outside traditional academia.

In 2023, Aaron became Fellow of Practice and Director, Digital Education Transformation at the Blavatnik School of Government. Aaron’s work at the Blavatnik School focuses on issues connecting technology, public policy and public administration. He teaches on the School’s Master of Public Policy and executive education programmes, and convenes its digital “thematic cluster”, bringing together scholarship and practice on digital issues. He co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology Policy and is a member of the OECD’s Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Futures.

He was previously a senior civil servant in the Singapore government, including being the founding Head of its Centre for Strategic Futures. Most recently, he served as Deputy Secretary (Industry & International) at the Singapore Ministry of Communications & Information, overseeing the ministry’s work in the digital economy, digital literacy and inclusion, and digital diplomacy – with a concurrent cross-government role coordinating Singapore’s strategy in global branding, soft power and public diplomacy.

At Somerville, Aaron will supervise graduate students interested in public policy and development issues. He will support the College’s career guidance programmes, particularly for students keen on government careers. As a trained facilitator of inter-religious dialogue, he will also contribute to the College’s multi-faith chapel programme.

As Director for the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust, Jessica oversees the financial aspects of the Trust and ensures that the objects of the charity are met. She works closely with the Director of the Thatcher Scholarship Programme, the Principal, Development Director, Trustees and Patrons in the execution of her role.

As we enter a new phase of fundraising to meet the College’s five-year strategy, Jessica has taken on the role of Campaign Director, working closely with the Development Director and Principal on the fundraising strategy, developing campaign messages, setting goals and developing the projects and tools that will allow the team to achieve the ambitious targets.