Support Staff

I work primarily on the intersection of literature and economics (in the ‘Economic Humanities’), and have published works on modernism, economics, critical theory and the philosophy of language. 

As a Rhodes Scholar, I received my DPhil (PhD) in English from Hertford College, Oxford, in 2024. I am currently working on turning my dissertation on Walter Benjamin into a book. This project not only tries to demonstrate how Benjamin’s philosophy allows us to think traditional approaches to economics anew, it also helps us see how, in Benjamin’s words, we might begin to work ourselves free of “the net in which we are caught.”

I have an edited collection with Palgrave Macmillan due to be published at the beginning of next year, entitled Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture and Economy. 

Lesley Brown is Centenary Fellow in Philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. She has published articles on ancient philosophy, contributed introductory material to Plato, Selected Myths (OWC, 2004) and introduced Plato’s Protagoras and Meno for Penguin Classics.

Paula Pimlott Brownlee is an American higher education consultant, and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College.

After studying for a DPhil in Organic Chemistry at Oxford, she became a research chemist and then an academic, holding professorships at several American universities. In 1990 she became President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Averil Cameron is a scholar of the Literature and history of the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Periods. She was Warden of Keble College from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies.

She held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in the Faculty of Theology 2011-13, and is chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. Averil is President of CBRL (Council for British Research in the Levant) and was President of FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques) from 2009-14.

After several recent contributions on the general history of late antiquity and Byzantium Averil Cameron is now returning to her earlier interest in Christian literature. Her Leverhulme project is focused on the large corpus of prose dialogues written by Christians, mainly in Greek, from the second century AD to the end of Byzantium. Some works exist about the earlier material, but there is no existing study which looks at the phenomenon as a whole, or relates the dialogues to other forms of Christian and non-Christian writing.

Dr Margaret Casely-Hayford (1980, Jurisprudence) is a lawyer, businesswoman and prominent advocate for diversity in education and public life.

She is the Chancellor of Coventry University and Chair of The Globe Theatre.

One of the first black British women to become a partner in a City law firm, she was named Black British Business Person of the year in 2014. After a 4 year stint as chair of charity ActionAid UK, she was awarded a CBE in 2018 for charitable services. She was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2020.

I studied for my MChem at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. I did a joint sponsored DPhil between the University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source, supervised by Professor Simon Clarke at the Department of Chemistry and Dr Silvia Ramos at the Core EXAFS beamline B18 at Diamond. My background is in the synthesis and characterisation of superconducting materials – using a combination of low and high temperature synthesis techniques, and a variety of characterisation methods centring around diffraction, absorption spectroscopy, and magnetometry.

I have been a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at St Catherine’s college since 2012, tutoring 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate chemists. In April 2019 I was appointed to manage the Inorganic Materials Characterisation Facility in the Chemistry Department of the University of Oxford and my current research greatly benefits from the strong collaborative links within the Chemistry department.

Dr Esther Cavett specialises in teaching music theory and analysis to the music students in Somerville College, and is Personal Tutor for Prelims.

Alongside her work at Somerville, she is Tutor in Music at Jesus and Lincoln Colleges, and Oxford Music Faculty Chair. She is also Senior Research Fellow in the music department at King’s College, London, where she co-ordinates the King’s St George’s Academy, which offers small-group, after-school music teaching for children living in Southwark, involving King’s College, London students as teaching assistants.

She set up and now assists in the running of Water City Music, a charity providing access to performance opportunities for musicians of all skills levels, working collaboratively, and she is trustee of The Society of Music Theory (SMA), where she was sponsor the SMA Music Literacy research programme and for the SMA’s widening participation offering generally.

Her recent publications and publications in progress focus on music literacies and pedagogies, the ethics of writing about living composers, and the perception of repetition in the music of English contemporary composer Howard Skempton. 

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I am a clinician scientist with a particular interest in pre-eclampsia and angiogenic factors.

We recently conducted the first clinical trial on the use of sFlt-1/PlGF ratio in the management of patients with suspected pre-eclampsia (Cerdeira AS et al. Hypertension 2019). Data from our study and previous observations lead to the development of a protocol that is now used in clinical practice. My aim is to continue exploring the role of angiogenic factors in the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of pre-eclampsia, hopefully leading to meaningful changes in patient care.

News:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/new-blood-test-takes-doubt-out-of-pre-eclampsia-pp5mmv30p

https://www.ouh.nhs.uk/news/article.aspx?id=1058

I am interested in the application of insights from behavioural economics to policy-making. My doctoral research at the Blavatnik School of Government seeks to focus on biases in information processing and belief updating in the context of the spread of health-related misinformation in India. Ultimately, my goal is to help governments develop effective policy solutions, which are grounded in theory and supported by evidence.

Prior to starting at Blavatnik, I worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Sir Julian Le Grand at the Marshall Institute, London School of Economics. In this role, I drew upon economic and psychological theory to study and model altruistic behaviour and conducted empirical research to understand the factors underlying ethical consumption choices. My experience of working in the social development sector, at Becoming I Foundation cultivated my interest in policy research. In collaboration with Teach for India, I worked to bring reforms in education for low-income groups in New Delhi and engaged directly with the beneficiaries, which helped me see how policies affect people on the ground.

I received my undergraduate training in economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and a Master of Sciences in management and strategy from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. My master’s thesis focussed on discouraging consumption of single-use plastic bags while grocery shopping online and studied the effects of behavioural interventions on fostering a commitment to reuse carry bags. The paper is now published in the journal Behavioural Public Policy (2020).

Dr. David Chapman is a Senior Research Associate in the Solid Mechanics and Materials Engineering group, Department of Engineering Science, Oxford, UK.

David is also a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, and currently holds a visiting academic position at Imperial College London. His current research interests involve the development and application of modern diagnostics such as spatially resolved velocimetry, temporally and spatially resolved spectoscopy for temperature measurements, or the the use of advanced x-ray sources to investigate the incipent stages of material failure under extreme conditions.

Through her academic and research activities, Kankana questions the central role that conjugality has historically played in determining women’s social position and reception.

Kankana has always been moved by the gross deprivations meted out to single women, especially widows. Through her stint at Oxford, she intends to sharpen her critical understanding of the heteropatriarchal gender norms in order to address how or whether singlehood affects women’s access to developmental resources in the regime of governmentality, especially in the postcolonial condition.

Kankana gained her bachelor’s degree in 2020 from the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is looking forward to receiving her master’s degree from the same department in 2022. As a student of Modern South Asian Studies at Oxford, she would like to complement her training in deciphering literary texts with some training in social research and an understanding of contemporary South Asia. She has been interested in studies on the long nineteenth century, life histories, postcolonial theory and literature, gender studies and translation and strongly believes that her regular participation in academic discussions in the areas of her interest has enhanced her critical and analytical skills and ability to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Dr. Natalia Chepiga is a physicist working on quantum many-body phenomena.

She studies quantum phase transitions—processes that occur at zero temperature and describe changes between distinct quantum phases of matter. Her work lies at the intersection of computational and theoretical physics, quantum information, quantum computing, and magnetism; she is an active developer of tensor network algorithms. Before joining the University of Oxford, Dr. Chepiga was an Assistant Professor at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and Delft University of Technology. Since 2024, she has served as an Associate Editor of Physical Review Research of the American Physical Society.

I am the Lord and Lady McNair Early Career Fellow in Law at Somerville College, teaching Criminal Law and Constitutional Law. My doctoral research, supervised by Professor Laura Hoyano and funded by the Gopal Subramaniam OICSD scholarship, examined how rape adjudication takes place in India.

Prior to taking up doctoral studies, I read on the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) programme and the MPhil in Law at Oxford as a Cornelia Sorabji Scholar. I also hold a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from the National Law University, Delhi (India).

Awards and Previous Qualifications

• BA, LLB (Hons), National Law University Delhi (July 2017)
• Bachelor of Civil Law, University of Oxford (July 2018)
• Master of Philosophy in Law, University of Oxford (October 2019)
• Awarded Archibald Jackson Prize for securing a Distinction on the BCL
• Awarded Suresh Shroff Gold Medal for First Rank Holder of Batch of 2012-17, National Law University, Delhi.
• Recipient of Cornelia Sorabji Scholarship by Somerville College, University of Oxford and Goa Education Trust (British Council) Scholarship to pursue Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) at University of Oxford for the year 2017-18.
• Recipient of Somerville College Alumni Scholarship and scholarship by Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) to pursue MPhil (Law) at University of Oxford for the year 2018-19.
• Recipient of Gopal Subramanium Scholarship by OICSD Somerville College to pursue DPhil (Law) at University of Oxford starting October 2019.
• Awarded Modern Law Review Scholarship 2021.
• Awarded Mike Redmayne Award for research into Criminal Law and the Law of Evidence (MLR) 2022.
• Awarded Best Doctoral Student Prize at the Society of Legal Scholars’ Annual Conference 2023.

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.

Amy is a biochemist and biophysicist at the Centre of Medicines Discovery, in the lab of Dr. Oleg Fedorov. She uses high-throughput methods to screen drug candidates for a variety of human diseases, by measuring specific thermodynamic and kinetic properties of drug binding.

Amy’s research projects focus on characterising drugs involved in epigenetics and the ubiquitin system, both of which are heavily associated with cancers. Prior to embarking on these research projects, Amy was a structural biologist investigating how protein receptors work together to control the wiring of the brain. Her DPhil and first postdoctoral role were also at the University of Oxford, in the lab of Prof. Elena Seiradake. Here, she used a combination of cell biology, biophysics, X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy techniques to investigate the interactions of large receptor complexes involved in mammalian brain development. The work aimed not only to enhance our understanding of neural connectivity but also holds potential implications for developing therapeutic strategies targeting neurological disorders. Amy is driven by the aspiration that her scientific contributions will one day lead to the development of various drugs that successfully pass clinical trials and ultimately save lives.

Gillian Clark is Professor Emerita (since 2010) of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. She read Greats (Greek and Latin language and literature, ancient history, and philosophy) at Somerville, and also took her MA and DPhil here.

After Oxford, Professor Clark taught at the universities of Glasgow, St Andrews, and Manchester before her appointment to Liverpool and then to Bristol. Her research field is known to classicists as late antiquity and to theologians as early Christian studies or patristics. She works on social and intellectual history, with a special interest in the lives of women. Her continuing project is a commentary on Augustine, City of God.

Professor Clark also co-edits, with Andrew Louth FBA, the monograph series Oxford Early Christian Texts / Studies (OUP), and she is a General Editor of the series Translated Texts for Historians 300-800 (Liverpool University Press), which provides scholarly annotated translations from the languages of the Roman empire and its neighbours and successors.

Damian Clements is the Somerville College accountant. He joined Somerville in January 2024 after working at All Souls College, Oxford, and supporting a comprehensive transformation of the 18^thCentury stately home Harewood House in Yorkshire.

Damian first trained as an accountant with Deloitte in Jersey after reading PPE at Trinity College, Oxford. He then worked for several years in TV and for the BBC before deciding to concentrate his energies on charities including London Zoo, the Royal Court Theatre, Leeds Culture Trust and the aforementioned Harewood House.

Despite going to Trinity, Damian has a strong Somerville connection; his mother and two close family friends read zoology here, as did his cousin and older sister. Now Damian is keen to help Somerville increase its financial management and love of Excel spreadsheets. Outside work, Damian listens to many hours of radio drama and audiobooks while going on long walks to pubs, normally with a play script in his pocket to read when he gets there

Dame Elan Closs Stephens (1966, English) is a Welsh educator and policy-maker for broadcasting and the arts.

She has served as a Governor of the British Film Institute, commissioner of the Electoral Commission for Wales, and is currently the BBC Board member for Wales. In January 2020, she was appointed Pro Chancellor of Aberystwyth University.

She was honoured with a CBE in 2001 for her services to broadcasting and to the Welsh Language, and made a Dame in 2019 for her services to the Welsh government and to broadcasting. She was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2020.

As Programme Director of the MTST, Claire is responsible for mentoring and supporting the Thatcher Scholars and for publicising and evaluating the Thatcher Scholarship Programme. Claire also devises, adapts and oversees the Development Programme, which is open to all students of Somerville.

Claire read Biochemistry at Somerville before gaining a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge. During her Post-Doc in Cambridge, she was awarded a Media Fellowship, working with Tim Radford at The Guardian and subsequently as a freelance science writer. After deciding to hang up her lab coat in 2001, Claire pioneered a cross-disciplinary Master’s Programme in Bioscience Enterprise at Cambridge in partnership with MIT, aimed at bio-entrepreneurs and future leaders of the life science sector.

In 2005, Claire joined the Babraham Institute – a biomedical research organisation in Cambridge – where she was responsible for corporate communications, media liaison, public engagement and knowledge exchange and undertook PR for the campus, home to over 40 life science companies. She established a successful Science & Society Programme delivering novel science enrichment activities for schools, and summer research opportunities to inspire young people about science and STEM careers. During this time, Claire was a Graduate Tutor at Newnham College, Cambridge providing pastoral support and mentoring for a growing graduate community.

Claire is a trustee of STEM Team East, an educational charity that enriches science in schools, and has received awards for work with schools. She joined the Board of the biomedical charity Understanding Animals in Research in 2016 and is a member of the BioIndustry Associations’ Communications Advisory Committee. After joining the Centre for Personalised Medicine in Oxford during its start-up phase in 2013, Claire now offers consultancy in science communication and public engagement. She is a fellow of the Society of Biology, the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and in 2012 was selected as a fellow of the British-American Project – a transatlantic leadership network from a broad spectrum of occupations and backgrounds.

Becca plays a leading role in realising Somerville’s fundraising goals, with particular responsibility for major gifts and legacies.

Following a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology at Durham, Becca was a postgraduate researcher in the philosophy of education at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She then worked in the City as a lobbyist for the financial services industry before becoming Major Gifts Officer at Keble College.

If you are thinking about making a major gift, or leaving a legacy, Becca would love to hear from you. You can contact her by email on rebecca.coker@some.ox.ac.uk or phone her at +44 (0) 7890 412404.

Becky Cotton-Barratt oversees graduate students and academic HR, as well as supporting the college in policy matters.

She graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Earth Sciences, and then completed a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Warwick. She previously worked as the Admissions and Outreach Coordinator for the Mathematical Institute, and finds committees oddly enjoyable.