Support Staff

Oliver graduated with a first-class degree in Medicine from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

During his medical studies, Oliver was involved in numerous research projects, studying the effects of neurotrophic growth factors at the University of Helsinki and the binding properties of a stimulant substance methcathinone on dopamine receptors at the University of Tartu.

In 2015 he took a year off of his medical studies to come to the University of Oxford and examine the role of D1/D2-like and 5-HT2C receptors on goal-directed actions, funded by the Archimedes Fund from Estonia.

Oliver is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford as a member of the Sharott Group and the Walton Group (Experimental Psychology). His research focuses on the role of the projection from prefrontal cortex to the dorsomedial striatum in co-ordinating motivated action, with a particular focus of elucidating the circuit disruptions leading to poverty of movement in Parkinson’s disease. He aims to use these experiments to develop closed-loop deep brain stimulation approaches for the treatment of motivational deficits.

Jim Harris is the Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, and an art historian specialising in late-medieval and early-Renaissance sculpture.

At the Ashmolean, he is responsible for exploring the use of the Museum’s collections in the university curriculum, devising and delivering classes and courses across a wide range of disciplines and training faculty and early-career researchers to deploy objects and images in developing their own teaching practice.

He has been an Academic Visitor at Somerville since 2017 and a member of the Somerville Medieval Research Group, building a number of long-standing teaching partnerships with members of the college.  He has taught the college’s English undergraduates alongside Dr Annie Sutherland every year since 2012.

Jim trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and later, after over a decade in theatre and television, as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute. He wrote his PhD thesis on the polychrome sculpture of Donatello, and held the Courtauld’s Andrew W Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship in Conservation before coming to Oxford.

“My research has been focused on the materials and techniques of sculpture, and especially in the question of how three-dimensional surfaces are transformed by polychromy, the addition of paint, gold and inlays, and by the subsequent, successive alterations, deliberate or by chance, that they undergo during their lifetimes.

Anna’s first career was in infrastructure and security, where she acted as a freelance project manager for multiple government bodies and FTSE 500 companies. Thirteen years ago, she decided to turn her lifelong passion for gardening into a second career, retraining at Jesus College, Oxford.

Anna has since worked in several large estate gardens, including Dorney Court and Denham Place, as well as offering freelance garden design and consultancy. At Somerville, she looks forward to supporting Head Gardener Alistair Malick in bringing the Somerville gardens into the 21st century, whilst delivering a beautiful and sustainable garden (featuring as many alpine plants and clipped shrubs as possible in order to fulfil her passion for niwaki/bonsai and mountain plants).

Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey CBE FBA FRHistS is a British medieval historian.

She was the joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize in 1993 for her book Living and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience, which examines the lives of monks at Westminster Abbey, one of England’s greatest medieval monasteries. In 1982 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne MBE (née Ebrahim, 1978, Medicine) is Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She was elected in 2022, becoming the fifth woman to hold the position.

Professor Hawthorne has been a GP for 37 years, with 30 of them spent working in South Wales. She qualified from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1984, and completed her GP training in Nottingham in 1988. Kamila was Head of the Graduate Entry Medicine Programme at Swansea University and is on the Trustee Boards of the Kings Fund, and Cardiff Women’s Aid. She is also a Bevan Commissioner and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Kamila has a deep interest in medical education, and believes passionately in the importance of training excellent, caring and inclusive GPs for a global society. She is passionate about the role of GPs in patient care and as advocates for patients.

Her research and clinical working interests have been in health inequalities and access to health services, (her MD was based on working with BAME patient groups with Type 2 diabetes in Nottingham, Manchester and Cardiff). With wide experience of general practice and running community projects in diabetes and heart disease, she has been named ‘GP of the Year’ twice and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to General Practice.

The RCGP is the UK’s largest medical college, with over 50,000 members. It represents and supports GPs on key issues including licensing, education, training, research and clinical standards. The RCGP has both a President and a Chair, but the former is a mainly ceremonial role. As Chair, Professor Hawthorne sets the college’s policy direction, and leads the RCGP decision making body.

Professor Hawthorne was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville in June 2025. 

Hello, I’m Mehtab, and I am the Vice-President of the MCR. I am a final year DPhil student studying ion channel proteins and membrane transport in health and disease using interdisciplinary approaches that means I work in of Biophysics, Chemistry, and Pharmacology.

As MCR Vice-President, my duties are in supporting the president and the running of the executive committee. My other priorities are in advocating for improving transparency and democratisation of the MCR, as well as working to improve physical wellbeing facilities for MCR members. If you have any questions, suggestions, or critiques about the running of the MCR, especially if you feel that your voice isn’t being heard, please reach out to me. Part of maintaining the respectful and diverse MCR environment that we all cherish is making sure nobody is feeling left behind or excluded.

My research interests are in cardiac metabolism and how this can be imaged using advanced cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) techniques. I am interested in understanding how the heart produces and uses energy to pump and how this becomes deranged in heart failure.

My previous work has focused on the metabolic derangement induced by the chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin in a rodent model of cardiotoxicity, showing early derangements in myocardial energetics which precede overt systolic dysfunction. More recently I have investigated the ability of novel therapeutic agents to alter myocardial metabolism in the setting of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). I have also used advanced CMR to define the novel cardiovascular phenotype of inflammatory conditions such as IgG4 related disease and to assess changes in cardiac remodelling which occur following bariatric surgery. I am project lead on JeFF: Jersey Fighting Failure which seeks to revolutionise heart failure care on Jersey and has been selected as pilot project for the British Society of Heart Failure’s 25 in 25 initiative. 

I also have experience of large-scale clinical trials through my involvement as a research assistant on the ChAdOx-1 COVID-19 vaccine trials. I also have experience working with large databases such as QResearch.

Background

I am an Academic Clinical Fellow in Cardiology at Oxford University Hospitals and an Honorary Research Fellow at Jersey General Hospital. I am also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College, University of Oxford, where I was an undergraduate student. Outside clinical, research and teaching activities I have a keen interest in rugby union, having gained 4 Rugby Blues at Oxford and played in the Universities World Cup in Japan in 2019.

Dame Julia Stretton Higgins, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Polymer Science in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology at Imperial College London.

Higgins was the former chair (1998–2003) of the Athena Project, which aims for the advancement of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) in Higher Education. She is now the Patron of the Athena Swan Awards Scheme. Between 2003 and 2007, she was chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Higgins was president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers 2002–3, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 2003–4. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was its Foreign Secretary 2001–6. She was Chair of the Royal Society’s State of the Nation Report Steering Group. Most recently she chaired Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME). (2008-2012) She currently Chairs the Royal Society project (funded by BIS) on increasing diversity in the scientific workforce

She is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the City and Guilds of London Institute, of which she is also Vice-President. She is also an honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Somerville College, Oxford. She was awarded a CBE in 1996 before being named a dame in the 2001 Queen’s Birthday Honours list.She holds honorary degrees from a number of UK Universities ans also from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Her scientific work has concentrated on the investigation of polymers with neutron scattering. She co-authored a monograph on that field (Higgins & Benoit 1997). In 1999, she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. She was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She is a Chevalier de la Legion D’Honneur

Carole Hillenbrand was educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. She was appointed Professor of Islamic History in 2000 and served as Head of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, from 1997-2002 and from 2006-2008.

She has been Professor Emerita of Islamic History at Edinburgh since 2008. She was awarded an OBE for services to Higher Education in 2009. She was Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA in 1994 and 2005, at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands in 2002, and Visiting Professor at the University of St Louis, USA, 2011 and 2013.

In 2005 she was awarded the King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies, 2005 (the first non-Muslim to be awarded this prize). In 2015, she was given the British Society for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Award for Services to Middle Eastern Studies. In 2016 she was awarded the British Academy/ Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding.

She has been Islamic Advisory Editor at Edinburgh University Press since 1983 and Editor of the series entitled “Studies in Persian and Turkish History”, published by Routledge since 1999.

Her research interests include the Crusades, the Seljuqs of Iran and Turkey, and medieval Muslim political thought, especially the work of al-Ghazali.

I completed my PhD in German Studies at Yale University in 2019. Prior to that, I received an MA in German Literature from the University of Hamburg (2013) and a BA in German Studies and Political Science from the University of Münster (2009).

I have taught undergraduate courses on German-speaking literature, philosophy, and culture at Yale, Hamburg, and Goethe University Frankfurt. Currently I teach at several colleges across the university, including Somerville.

My research is situated at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, with an emphasis on 20th-century German literature and critical theory. I’m currently working on my first book, a genealogy of the idea of contemporaneity (“Zeitgenossenschaft”) in modern thought, literature, and the arts from the early 19th century to the present day. Other areas of interest include philosophical theories of literature, Marxism, aesthetics, contemporary literature and visual culture.

Research Interests

Salome manages all aspects of HR for academic and support staff including policies, reporting, recruitment, appointments and compliance. Any HR queries can be directed to human.resources@some.ox.ac.uk

HR hours are Monday – Friday 8.00 a.m. – 4.00 p.m. and either Salome or her colleague, Sarah, will be happy to help with any HR questions you have.

Henry Hung joined Somerville in October 2023 as a Fulford Junior Research Fellow. He is also a Lecturer in Biology at Magdalen and St Hilda’s.

His main research concerns the adaptation and genomics of forest trees. He started his research in tropical forests in Southeast Asia. He is now shifting his focus to temperate forests in Europe and North America. He also conducts research in Wytham and Blenheim in Oxford.

He currently co-chairs the Ecological Genetics Group and serve in the Events Committee of the British Ecological Society. He is named a National Geographic Explorer in 2022 for his research on critically endangered rosewood trees. His research on rosewoods is featured in the University News: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/features/race-save-world-s-most-trafficked-wild-species

He graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in Biology, triple-minoring in Environmental Science, German, and Music. He then read his doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Tin Hang Hung (洪天恒) is a Cantonese name. First name is ‘Tin Hang’ altogether, surname is ‘Hung’. There is no middle name. ‘Henry’ is the preferred alternative name.

Professor Lorna Hutson (1976, DPhil English) is Merton Professor of English.

Professor Hutson’s work focuses on the interrelations between early modern Enlish literary form and other forms of cultural practice, including economics, law, and national conception. Her monograph The Invention of Suspicion won the Roland Bainton Prize in 2008, and The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 won the Bainton Reference Prize in 2018. Her current project – England’s Insular Imagining – studies how early modern literature spanning multiple genres contributed to the conception of England as the whole island of Britain. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

My research lies at the intersection of probability, statistics and computation, applied to problems in genetics.

I am interested in what we can learn about evolution by analysing sequenced genomes: for instance, through reconstructing the shared genetic history of a sample of individuals, we can gain insights into past demography, understand how genetic variation arises and how it is shaped by natural selection to produce the patterns we observe in the data. 

Trained in soil science, Associate Professor John Ingram gained extensive experience in the 1980s working in Africa and Asia in agriculture and forestry research projects.

In 1991 he was recruited by UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to help organise, coordinate and synthesise research on global change and agroecology, part of IGBP’s international global change research programme. In 2001 he was appointed the Executive Officer for the international research project “Global Environmental Change and Food Systems” (GECAFS). On the close of GECAFS in 2011 he was appointed NERC Food Security Leader until assuming his current role of Food Systems Programme Leader at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute in May 2013.

John’s interests are in the conceptual framing of food systems; the interactions among the many actors involved and their varied activities, and the outcomes of their activities for food security, livelihoods and environment; and food system resilience. He has designed and led regional food system research projects in Europe, south Asia, southern Africa and the Caribbean and has conceived, developed and/or led a range of major international research initiatives. He has had substantial interaction with FAO, UNEP and CGIAR and many other international organisations, with national departments and agencies, with NGOs, and with businesses in the food sector, helping to establish research on the links between food security and environment through the analysis of food systems. In addition to leading the food systems research group within ECI, he also leads the multi-university post-graduate Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning programme (IFSTAL), and coordinated the UK Global Food Security programme ‘Resilience of the UK Food System‘. He is an Associate Professor in Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College.

I grew up in Britain and in the US. I studied at Cambridge, and was a tutorial fellow at Somerville for 36 years, 1982-2018. I hold the title of Professor of Modern History from the university, and continue to supervise graduate students.

I am interested in government, society and ideas, in Britain, Europe and the larger European world, between the later seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries. More specifically, my research and writing has two main strands. One concerns developments in British, especially English social policy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: my monograph Inferior Politics pulls together some of writings on that topic. In addition, for about twenty years I have been running an international collaborative project about changing attitudes to and practices associated with democracy in Europe and both Americas in the same period. We have published three books arising from that project, and are now at work on a fourth and final volume, which focusses on what we call central and northern Europe: broadly, Germany and lands adjacent. I see the academic study of history as a collaborative exercise, and have been involved in collaborative projects throughout my career. Between 1990 and 2000 I was co-editor of Past and Present, and have recently retired from a position as chair of that journal’s editorial board. I’m also on the boards of several other English and French-language history journals. I have spent several periods teaching or researching abroad: in Australia, Germany, Japan, France and most recently Finland.

Julie Jack is a philosopher and emeritus fellow of Somerville College.

Julie Jack was elected as fellow in Philosophy of Somerville College in 1969, succeeding Elizabeth Anscombe. A specialist in philosophical logic, Julie taught across a wide range of subjects in philosophy, and made a great mark on her Somerville pupils. After resigning her Fellowship in 1987, she taught for some years in Cambridge.

My research interests pertain to public international law and climate change. I seek to study the impact of rising sea levels on international maritime boundaries and maritime entitlements, to better understand how the law on this subject may be developed to accommodate such change.

My attraction to the law stems from the pivotal role it plays in shaping society. It is for this reason that I have nurtured a deep interest in public international law. I believe it possesses tremendous potential to change the lives of the most vulnerable, and mold society for the better.

During my undergraduate studies at the National Law School I pursued every opportunity to further my passion for international law. I was fortunate to argue the finals of the ICC moot before sitting judges of the International Criminal Court, at The Hague. I worked extensively on the law of statehood whilst competing at the Jessup Moot. Through my internship with Mr. Soli Sorabjee, I worked on a major international maritime dispute, the Enrica Lexie case.

The Rhodes Scholarship enabled me to read for the Bachelor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford, where I engaged more deeply with the subject through courses such as International Law and Armed Conflict as well as International Law of the Sea. I added breadth to this engagement in my second year at Oxford where I read for an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, gaining a better understanding of the real-world hurdles that reside in the practice of international law.

I hope to nurture this passion further, as an Indira Gandhi Scholar at the Oxford India Centre, whilst reading for my DPhil in Law at Somerville.

Awards and Previous Qualifications

• Oxford – MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Distinction)
• Oxford – Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction)
• NLSIU – B.A., LL.B. (H)
• Rhodes Scholar (India & Exeter, 2017)
• Oxford Department of International Development Faculty Prize for Best Thesis in the MSc (RFMS) [2019]
• Volterra Fietta Prize for International Law of the Sea (BCL) [2018]
• Gold Medal for Best Student Advocate [2017]

Savy is reading for the MSc in Law and Finance offered jointly by the Faculty of Law and the Saïd Business School. He graduated from the National Law University, Delhi in 2015 and previously worked with an international law firm in London. Savy is admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales and as an advocate in India.

Our world today is increasingly introspecting the role of the corporation. While it remains to be seen whether the shift towards stakeholder capitalism by the 2019 Business Roundtable was just empty rhetoric, socio-economic inequalities continue to widen further. I am keen to explore the economic interests underpinning corporate decision-making, the financial tools used to evaluate corporate success and the balancing of legal relations of the corporation with its stakeholders.

The Oxford India Centre and the Zaiwalla scholarship have given me the incredible opportunity to study while at Somerville College for which I am grateful. I am keen to immerse myself in the programme with the hope that I can meaningfully contribute to the above-mentioned issues which I believe will come to define my generation.

‘I want to develop a greater understanding of the interrelationship between law and the social embeddedness of energy transition in India. By viewing energy transition through the brackets of law we see a powerful story of how it stimulates social justice. Transition creates access to electricity, improves standards of living and stimulates sustainable development’

Navya Jannu is a Doctor of Philosophy candidate at the University of Oxford. She is an Indira Gandhi scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development at Somerville College and the Convenor of the Environmental Law Discussion Group at the Oxford Law Faculty.

Navya’s research focuses on law, climate change and clean energy infrastructure in India. Through her doctoral research, Navya explores the role of lower courts and tribunals in India’s transition to renewable energy. In particular, she studies the role of the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) and National Green Tribunal (NGT) in this process. Prior to the DPhil, Navya read for an MPhil in Law in 2018 and completed the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) with Distinction in 2017 at the University of Oxford as an HSA Advocates Scholar. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours from Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), India.

Awards and Previous Qualifications:

• Oxford- MPhil in Law (2018)
• Oxford Law Faculty Scholarship (2017)
• Oxford- Bachelor of Civil Law (Distinction) (2017)
• HSA Advocates Scholarship (2016)
• Archibald Jackson Prize for Distinction on BCL (2017)
• JGLS- B.A., LL.B (Hons) (Distinction) (2016)
• University Gold Medal for Outstanding Academic Performance and All-Round Excellence (JGLS, 2016)

Margaret Ann Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington PC, is a Labour party peer and former Leader of the House of Lords.

Margaret’s father was former Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, and she was educated at Blackheath High School and Somerville College, Oxford.

Between 1965 and 1977 she held production posts within the BBC working on current affairs and further education television programmes. She then became a journalist on the BBC’s prestigious Panarama programme, and Thames Television’s This Week. She went on to present the BBC2 series Social History of Medicine, as well as being a contributor to Newsnight, Any Questions, Question Time and other current affairs programmes. She has a strong interest in health issues, notably as a campaigner on HIV and Aids. She was a founder director of the National Aids Trust in 1987. She is also a patron of Help the Aged.

She was appointed a life peer in 1992 with the title of Baroness Jay of Paddington, of Paddington in the City of Westminster, and acted as an opposition Whip in the House of Lords. In association with the shop workers’ union, she led opposition to the liberalisation of Sunday trading hours.

After her party’s election victory in 1997, she became Health Spokesman and Minister for Women in the House of Lords. From 1998 she was Leader of the House of Lords, playing a pivotal role in the major reform that led to the removal of most of its hereditary members. She retired from active politics in 2001.

Among numerous non-executive roles that she has taken on since retiring from politics, she was a non-executive director of BT Group. She is currently co-chair of the cross-party Iraq Commission (along with Tom King and Paddy Ashdown) which was established by the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank and Channel 4.