People

Hey! I’m Francess and I’m a graduate entry medical student at Somerville. I am based mostly in the John Radcliffe hospital, but you can often find me in the library or in any of the wonderful cafés we have in Jericho.

As Vice President, my role involves supporting the president in the running of the executive and representative committee. I also play a role in organising initiatives with focuses ranging from social conscience to promoting personal and academic development. My goal is to work collaboratively with the committee to provide sufficient opportunities for postgraduates to thrive and leave Oxford with a fulfilling, memorable experience.

I always love to hear from you, whether that’s to share ideas about future events or to grab a coffee – do not hesitate to reach out for a chat! 

I completed the B.A.LL.B. (Hons) Course at NALSAR University of Law in 2021, and have remained at the top of my class for five years. During the BCL, I hope to study private international law with an emphasis on dispute resolution. I am particularly excited to be able to explore the intersection of this field with public policy.  

I have been interested in dispute resolution mechanisms ever since I was introduced to them in my first year of law school. While pursuing this interest through various avenues, I witnessed the influence of gender and race on seemingly neutral standards. This has motivated me to analyse private law structures through an interdisciplinary and critical lens.

I have attempted to evaluate the relationship between dispute resolution and policy through various publications. Recently, I co-authored a book chapter analysing the impact of investment arbitration costs on the pursuit of justice. Due to my manifest inclination towards this subject, I was nominated by the Telangana government to attend a conference in the Hague where I worked with policy students on developing fair responses to cyber-conflicts. Currently, I am serving as the executive-secretary for an international task-force that seeks to expand arbitration norms to meet the representative and decentralised conception of justice held by the global technology sector. These experiences have solidified my interest in building a career in dispute resolution, and contributing to both academic literature and ongoing efforts seeking to make the field more equitable.

The BCL will empower me to pursue this interest to the fullest extent by allowing me to create a unique curriculum out of various specialised course options. I feel privileged to be able to spend this year at Somerville College, and hope to learn from its inspiring history of advocating for equality. I would like to express my gratitude to HSA Advocates and the OICSD for selecting me to be this year’s HSA Advocates Scholar and thereby enabling me to strive towards my objectives.

In February 2003, H.E. Judge Kuenyehia was nominated by the Government of Ghana and elected as judge of the International Criminal Court. She currently serves as President of the Appeals Division.

From March 2007 until March 2009, she was the Presiding Judge of Pre-Trial Chamber 1. In March 2003, after the inauguration of the judges of the ICC, she was elected First Vice-President and was a judge in the Pre-Trial Division. H.E. Judge Kuenyehia was born in Akropong, Akuapem in Ghana and obtained her first degree from the Faculty of Law, university of Ghana, Legon. She then attended Somerville College, Oxford University, where she obtained a BCL, and shortly thereafter became the first female to be appointed as a law professor at the University of Ghana. While at the university, she taught criminal law, gender and the law, international human rights law and public international law.

She is a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Ghana and has extensive experience as a solicitor, advocate, and law teacher. Judge Kuenyehia was Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghana for seven years before her election to the ICC. Outside of the University, Judge Kuenyehia was among other things, a member of the UN Expert Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a member of the Council of Cape Coast University and the Board of Directors of Barclays Bank, Ghana Limited. She has been a pioneer advocating for equal opportunity, justice and development for women in Ghana and around the world. She is co-author of a text book on Women and Law in Sub-Saharan Africa, published in August 2003, which is currently the only comprehensive text book on the subject.

Ghaith is a former Msc student who read Radiobiology in 2023/24.

As the previous MCR treasurer, he was involved in running MCR finances, and helped organise events and activities. As the current associate member representative, he aims to improve accessibility of associate members to college and MCR life. He is also the first point of contact for MCR associate members, and communicates closely with college. Ghaith’s proudest college achievement: the first ever student at Somerville to successfully borrow and drive the college van, bringing the MCR our lovely foosball table (with the help of Tim of course, see picture).

Charlotte leads a programme of research which focuses on understanding relationships between clinical communication and behaviour change.

She currently holds an EDI-Themed Fellowship, from the THIS Institute, and previously held a Mildred Blaxter Fellowship from the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness. She additionally holds research grants from the British Heart Foundation, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.

Her research has contributed to national guidelines, and she has advised government and policy makers. She is a member of the NICE Adoption and Impact Reference Panel, and an honorary member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics. In 2022 she was the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) Principal Investigator of the Year.

Charlotte is an experienced teacher and educator. Alongside her teaching role at Somerville she leads research methods courses within the Primary Care department and Medical Sciences division. She hold a postgraduate certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, awarded with Distinction.  In 2023 she was recipient of both the Medical Sciences Division ‘Excellent Supervisor’ award (recognising her significant contribution to supervision within the division), and the Society for Academic Primary Care Education Prize.

Key papers

• Clinician–patient communication about emergency aerial medical evacuation in case of infectious disease
• Relationship Between Clinician Language and the Success of Behavioral Weight Loss Interventions
• The importance of language in engagement between health-care professionals and people living with obesity: a joint consensus statement

Dr Anker’s research focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of inorganic nanomaterials, with a particular emphasis on integrating machine learning and robotics within a self-driving laboratory.

At Oxford, he is working on integrating energy calculations into his modelling tools for scattering data and using energy calculations to provide prior information about which chemical compounds are stable under various synthetic conditions. This can guide the self-driving laboratory in achieving controlled synthesis of materials with tailored functionalities.

Dr Anker completed his PhD in 2023 at the University of Copenhagen and is now a Novo Nordisk Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Denmark and Oxford University. His achievements include the Danscatt PhD Prize and recognition in Forbes 30 Under 30.

Dr Susan Anthony is a Consultant Interventional Radiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where she served as Clinical Lead and Director of Radiology 2012-18.

Having qualified in 1992 from University College Hospital Medical School, London, she trained in Radiology at the Royal Free Hospital, London, before moving to Oxford in 2005.

Her specialist interests include Non-invasive Vascular Imaging, Cardiac Imaging, Intervention (including Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty, Aortic Stent Grafting and Uterine Artery Embolisation), Endovenous Laser Treatment for Varicose Veins, and Interventional Oncology (Transarterial Chemoembolisation, Selective Internal Radiation Therapy and Portal Vein Embolisation).

Suzie has an honorary senior clinical lecturer position at the University of Oxford. She teaches anatomyand radiology to undergraduate and graduate-entry medical students and enjoys introducing young doctors to the opportunities provided by image-guided intervention. Suzie has an active interest in current research and is section editor for European Journal of Radiology.

Siddharth completed his DPhil, focused on developing statistical methods for time series forecasting, at Somerville College.

His research interests include Biomedical Signal & Image Processing, Statistical Modelling, Forecasting, and Chaos Synchronization. His work is primarily concerned with two application areas: Healthcare, and Energy.

Currently, Siddharth is investigating remote technologies for the diagnosis and monitoring of Parkinson’s disease. He develops statistical algorithms using data for voice, gait, posture, reaction times, dexterity, and tremor, collected using smartphones in a home and community setting. These algorithms are aimed at identifying patterns in the data, which can be used to discriminate people with Parkinson’s disease from healthy controls and accurately monitor the severity symptoms of the disease over time.

Siddharth is also working on a NHS funded project aimed at predicting the A&E arrivals, admissions and discharges across hospitals in the West Midlands. The algorithms developed as part of this project will be used operationally by the NHS to optimize staffing decisions, which would help reduce patient waiting times.

http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/arora/

Dr Helen Ashdown is a GP and clinical researcher based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences.

Helen completed her pre-clinical training at Cambridge, before moving to Oxford for her clinical studies and post-graduate training and DPhil in academic general practice. She is now an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care in Oxford. Her principal research interests are in respiratory disease and diagnosis in primary care, particularly the use of medical devices for diagnosis and monitoring. She also has longstanding interests in infection and child health, particularly infant feeding. Her current research uses information from large linked datasets collected from routine primary care consultations, and diagnostic prospective observational studies of novel medical technologies in primary and ambulatory care.

Helen works part-time as a GP at 19 Beaumont Street surgery in Oxford, where she is the Respiratory Lead GP.

At Somerville, Helen is the lead tutor for Clinical Medicine (Undergraduate Years 4-6 and Graduate Entry Years 2-4) and leads the team of tutors delivering clinical medicine tutorials, as well as having responsibility for pastoral care of students during their clinical years. She is passionate about teaching medicine and helping students to thrive during their time at Somerville.

Michael is a barrister at Wilberforce Chambers.

Before going to the Bar, Michael spent six years as Fellow and Tutor in law at Somerville College. His research concerned trustees’ powers and duties and the remedial consequences of breaches of trust, with a particular focus on the so-called “rule in Re Hastings-Bass”, and was cited in the Court of Appeal in Pitt v Holt [2011] EWCA Civ 197. He lectured, examined and gave tutorials on the law of trusts and Roman law. He continues to teach land law to Oxford undergraduates.

As a barrister, he appears regularly in the High Court and County Court, both as sole counsel and as a junior in a larger team.

Michael’s particular interests are in all aspects of litigation and advice relating to trusts law. This encompasses both traditional private client work and pension schemes, together with professional negligence in those fields.

Recent notable instructions include:

• British Airways v Maunder. Acting for British Airways in a long-running claim against the trustees of the Airways Pension Scheme for alleged breaches of trust in the exercise of discretionary powers, culminating in a 7-week trial before Morgan J (with Michael Tennet QC and Sebastian Allen).

• Acting (as sole counsel) for a minor beneficiary in two sets of contested High Court proceedings, first pursuant to Schmidt v Rosewood Trust Ltd to obtain trust accounts and other information to explain the diminution of the trust fund, and secondly to remove and replace the existing trustees.

• Acting (as sole counsel) in High Court proceedings for a beneficiary seeking to establish his entitlement to a half share in a substantial trust fund, and to value and realise that share.

• Acting (as sole counsel) for the claimant firm of solicitors in the County Court trial of their claim to recover unpaid fees from a client for whom they had acted in Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings.

• Advising the defendant administrator on claims under the under the Inheritance (Provision for Family of Dependants) Act 1975 concerning overseas property, the validity of UK and foreign marriages and divorces by both claimant and deceased, and the recognition in England of foreign polygamous marriage.

I teach linguistics to undergraduates at colleges across the University, including Somerville.

I provide supervision and teaching for students doing linguistics as part of a degree in Modern Languages and Linguistics, or Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

My background is in Classics and linguistics. I read Classics as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, and then completed a DPhil in linguistics, working on aspects of forms of address in Latin and the Romance languages, including their grammar, meanings, and uses. My main interests are in questions of how languages change in general and in the history of Latin and French in particular. Within this my research has often focused on changes that relate to semantics or pragmatics, such as the lexicography of medieval Latin and the history of T/V distinctions in romance languages.

Since finishing my doctorate, I have taught both Classics and linguistics at a number of colleges across Oxford as well as for the university. From 2004 to 2008, I was a member of the Classics Faculty Language Teaching Team and during that time he and James Morwood published Writing Latin (Bristol Classical Press, 2007), an introduction to prose composition in Latin. In 2008 I joined the faculty research project preparing the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, first as an assistant editor, in which role I was instrumental in developing the project’s use of technology; from 2011-14 I was the Dictionary’s final editor. Since 2014 I have been Lecturer in Classical Languages at University College, in which role I provide language teaching to the college’s classics students.

Bolanle Awe (Yoruba: Bọ́láńlé (Fájẹ́m̄bọ́là) Awẹ́) is a Nigerian and Yoruba history professor and pioneer of feminist history, intersectional thought and decolonisation.

Professor Awe was born on January 28, 1933, in the town of Ilesa, Nigeria. After taking a Master’s in History from St Andrew’s, she came to Somerville to read for her DPhil in 1958. She returned to Nigeria in 1960, where she became the first woman formally appointed to academic office in a Nigerian university. Following a stint at the University of Lagos, she returned to Ibadan, where she was promoted to Professor of Oral History in 1976.

Awe’s work is ground-breaking on several fronts. Her interest in oral history has made her a pioneer in documenting the pre-colonial histories of Nigeria and the Yoruba people, as well as an early advocate for the decolonisation of African history. She is also pioneering as a feminist historian, where her use of oral history helped restore the narratives of previously overlooked or misrepresented women such as Efunsetan Aniwura.

Awe was one of those pioneering women who began to use the master’s tools of academic knowledge and power to demolish the house built on male hegemony.’

TOYIN FALOLA, HONORARY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Awe was also one of the first people to critique the Western, liberal feminist position which universalises women’s subjugation under patriarchal rule. As an advocate of nuanced intersectional thought, Awe argued that we can better serve women’s causes by understanding the history of oppression from culture to culture. In 1983, Awe was made an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. She retired from teaching and government roles in 1998. In 2005 she became the Pro-Chancellor of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, and in 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ibadan on its seventieth anniversary.

Dr Ammar Azzouz is a Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow of Somerville College.

He is the Principal Investigator of ‘Slow Violence and the City’, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. 

Dr Azzouz studied architecture in the city of Homs, Syria, where he was born and raised. Since the start of the Syrian Revolution, over half of the neighbourhoods of Homs have been destroyed. In 2011, he moved to the UK to complete his postgraduate studies and received his PhD from the University of Bath. He has not been able to return to Homs since then.

Dr Azzouz has earned a wide recognition as a researcher, academic, architect and writer. His research on inclusive and diverse cities, queering public space, cultural heritage, architecture and war, reconstruction and forced migration has been featured in different platforms such as the New York Times, The Conversation, The New Statesman, New Lines Magazine, Middle East Eye, and also in academic journals such as Antipode, CITY, Change Over Time, Urban Studies and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Azzouz’s first book, Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023), offers fresh insights into the role of the architects during time of war. It explores how architecture is contested and weaponised during years of conflicts, and how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs of local communities. The book has a foreword, by Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent.

Before moving to academia, Azzouz worked in the private sector, at Arup. There, he established and led several research projects on themes related to forced migration, destruction of cities and cultural heritage. One of his projects included interviews with displaced people impacted by wars, and also academics researching wars and cities at different times in history and in different geographies (e.g. Spain, Poland, Bosnia and Syria).