Support Staff

Daniel is a barrister and currently a Probationary Tenant at Wilberforce Chambers.

Daniel teaches Roman Law at Somerville, having previously taught FHS Contract Law on behalf of the College in 2023. Daniel also teaches FHS Company Law on behalf of the Law Faculty. Alongside his academic and professional commitments, Daniel is a DPhil (part-time) candidate researching the control of discretionary powers and duties in company law, contract law, and insolvency law and is supervised by Professor Christopher Hare.

My research focuses on developing and integrating advanced NMR and mass spectrometry–based multiomics approaches to characterise metabolic pathways underlying neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

I aim to bridge analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, and data science to identify blood-based biomarkers for early disease detection and progression prediction.

At Oxford, I combine NMR metabolomics with proteomic and imaging biomarkers to develop predictive models for cognitive decline and disease progression, working in close collaboration with groups in Pharmacology and Biochemistry. Alongside my research, I tutor medical students at Somerville College, offering insights into disease from a molecular and analytical chemistry perspective.

I completed my DPhil in Chemistry at the University of Oxford in 2025 and am now an EPSRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in Physical Chemistry.

I am currently working on two related research projects:

First, in my dissertation project, I analyse the relationship of movement control and state building processes. By drawing from ideational critical juncture and institutional order arguments and by comparing political developments in Europe, the British Empire, and the United States, I show that there exist long exclusionary traditions of movement control in today’s Western democracies. I argue that practices of movement control are often underpinned by ideas about colonialism, race, and differential humanity. The monopolisation and institutionalisation of movement control in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is closely entangled with the rise of the modern nation state system.

Secondly, I am interested in the phenomenon of illiberalism in liberal democracies. As outlined in a recent article, I argue that what is commonly referred to as illiberalism should be analytically separated into two concepts: one anti-democratic variant termed disruptive illiberalism and one rooted in the politics of exclusion termed ideological illiberalism. By analysing these two strains individually, I develop a general theory of illiberalism in liberal democracies and try to answer the central question that motivated both of my projects: Why do even purportedly liberal democracies regularly and frequently engage in glaringly illiberal acts?

In my research, I combine approaches from history and the social sciences to uncover distal causes of political traditions and the interactions of ideas and institutions. My work employs qualitative, historical, and comparative methods. My primary supervisor is Desmond King. My secondary supervisors are Andrew Thompson (College) and Matthew Gibney (Department).

Before starting the DPhil in Politics at Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and Nuffield College, I completed the MSc in Politics Research (St Hilda’s College, Oxford). I hold a double-major BA in History and Political Science from Heidelberg University, Germany. During my studies at Heidelberg, I spent a year at St Hugh’s College. My Bachelor and Master’s programmes in Heidelberg and Oxford were funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and St Hilda’s College. My doctoral studies have been jointly funded by Nuffield College and the Economic and Social Research Council’s Grand Union DTP (Migration Pathway). I previously acted as the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace Fellow (ARSP) at the Holocaust Center of the Jewish Federation and the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, both Pittsburgh, PA, and as the Allianz Foundation Fellow at ARSP in Philadelphia, PA.

I teach Prelims Politics at Somerville College and offer undergraduate teaching of papers 205: “The Government and Politics of the United States” and 212: “International Relations in the Era of Two World Wars”. I offer postgraduate seminars in Qualitative Methods.

As of 2022, I am an AFHEA.

Dame Mary Keegan was born in 1953 and educated at Brentwood County High School and Somerville College, Oxford.

She was with Price Waterhouse (later PwC) from 1977 until 2001, occupying a number of senior roles during that time. She was a founder member of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Interpretations Committee and of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group Board.

In 1997 she was appointed the UK member of both the council and the executive of FEE (Fédération des Experts Comptables Européens) and she was also a founding member of the International Forum on Accountancy Development. She was also a member of the UK’s Urgent Issues Task Force.

She chaired the UK’s Accounting Standards Board from 2001 until her move to Whitehall in 2004.

In 2007 she was awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her hugely significant and lasting contribution to both HM Treasury itself and to the wider government agenda in financial management, government accounting and public spending. In 2014, she was given the accountancy profession’s most prestigious award – the ‘Award for Outstanding Achievement’ from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).

She has been a keen rower, sailor, gardener and musician, and has since 2008 been involved in a non-executive capacity in the National Audit Office, the Royal Horticultural Society, Falmouth University and the Business School at Exeter University.

Margaret read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford, then took up a teaching post at Cheadle Hulme School. After nine years at CHS, Margaret moved to Withington Girls’ School, where she became Headmistress in 1986.

Margaret was appointed North West Chairman of the Girls’ Schools Association for three years, and National President in 1994, when the annual conference was for the first time, at her insistence, held in Manchester.

Margaret was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Greater Manchester in 1998. Her other local appointments have included membership of the Granada Foundation since 1986, the Court of the University of Manchester from 1991 to 2004, and Trusteeship of the Museum of Science and Industry from 1998 to 2004.

In retirement, she has been a governor of Bolton School and Cheadle Hulme School since 2001, and Chair of the Manchester University Press Board since 2000.

Dr Radhika Khosla is Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development at the University of Oxford. She is the Programme Leader in Zero Carbon Energy Use at Oxford’s ZERO Institute. 

Radhika’s research portfolio includes being Principal Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country programme on the Future of Cooling, which examines rising extreme heat and the unprecedented increase in cooling energy demand in relation to the sustainable development goals. She is the Co-Investigator of Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research programme aimed at informing effective, equitable, and ambitious climate action, where she co-leads the workstream on inclusive and just net zero transitions.

Radhika works closely at the interface of research and policy. She is Editor-in-Chief of the high-impact peer reviewed journal, Environmental Research Letters. She has been Special Scientific Advisor to the UK’s House of Commons Environment Audit Committee for the inquiry on heat resilience and sustainable cooling (2023-24). She serves on the UK Government’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office UK-India Advisory Board. 

She has supported authorship of a number of international scientific reports and is lead author of the UNEP’s spotlight report on the first Global Cooling Watch (2023). She has also been an author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020) and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2022). 

An urban climatologist by training, her work seeks to advance understanding of one of the most fundamental questions of our time: how can societies improve human well-being while preserving and enhancing the natural environment? Her interdisciplinary research examines the productive tensions between energy consumption trajectories, urban transitions, and climate change governance – in the context of development – that lie at the heart of this global challenge.

Radhika has led research agendas and international knowledge networks on cooling, urban energy demand, sustainable development, and climate change policy. Using socio-technical systems analysis she examines these themes across levels of governance. Her research priorities include interrogating how, when, and why does energy use change as households urbanize and lifestyles change? What forms of governance and political rationalities characterize the varied urban responses to climate change, given their (often competing) objectives to provide urban services? Whether, and how, can emerging economies accelerate energy demand transitions? And how can we understand and equitably shape the future of global cooling demand in response to unprecedented extreme heat?

In 2023, she received an Honourable Mention for the Bina Agarwal Prize in Ecological Economics for her work on energy consumption pathways. As Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, she helps bridge research and networks on India at Oxford and international and was recognized as one of the ‘most influential people’ in UK-India relations (2019).

Radhika’s research has been covered widely in over 2,700 articles across 53 countries since 2021, including by The New York Times, The Times, The Independent, Reuters, the FT, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN, Time Magazine, Times of India, The Conversation and Carbon Brief. She has appeared on podcasts and broadcast television including the Sky News Daily Climate Show, Channel 5 News (1 million+ live viewers) and DW News (47,000 views).

Radhika’s other current academic affiliation is at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). She is on the boards of various organizations, journals and book presses; and holds a range of advisory roles within and beyond Oxford. Previously, she has been a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (India), and Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (USA). Radhika holds a PhD in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Oxford.

Teaching

Spaces, Infrastructure and Technology for Net Zero, Sustainable Development, for the MSc in Enterprise and the Environment

Governance, Policy and Politics for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment

Environmental Governance and Development for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment

Climate Change Negotiations: Policy Challenge for the Master’s in Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government

Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford Program for MBA students, Saïd Business School

Climate Change School, Oxford Climate Society, University of Oxford

Young Chan Kim is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow, Principal Investigator, Director of Graduate Studies (Paediatrics), Research Fellow at Wolfson College, and NHS doctor.

He obtained a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London, followed by medical degrees (BMBS, BMedSci, and MRes) at the University of Nottingham. After few years in clinical training, he came to Somerville College to pursue a DPhil in Clinical Medicine. His DPhil research focused on vaccine development against arthropod-borne viruses, supported by Innovate UK funding. For his overall performance during his doctorate at the Nuffield Department of Medicine (NDM), he was awarded the highly prestigious NDM Graduate Student Prize 2020 (Overall Prize Winner).

In 2021, he received an NIHR Oxford BRC grant for his postdoctoral research and was elected Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Wolfson College. That same year, he joined the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, leading projects on enteric fever (typhoid and paratyphoid) and Q fever.

In 2022, he was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship to establish his independent research programme on vaccines and therapeutics against arboviruses. Between 2022 and 2023, he also secured MRC HIC-VAC and MRC IAA grants to develop serological assays for enteric fever, as well as MLSTF and MRC IAA grants to develop a novel vaccine against Chagas disease.

After successfully securing three SBRI Innovate UK awards in 2023, he began leading a team of postdoctoral researchers, research assistants, and students working on vaccines against plague, Q fever, and alphaviruses, while also overseeing Paratyphoid and C. difficile human challenge studies with Prof Sir Andrew Pollard. In the same year, he was elected Research Fellow (RF) at Wolfson College. Since 2024, he has served as Deputy Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Paediatrics, before becoming Director of Graduate Studies in 2025, providing academic leadership and oversight of graduate student supervision. 

In 2025, he received MRC IAA and two BactiVac grants to evaluate the efficacy of viral-vectored and mRNA vaccines against Chagas disease, plague and Q-fever. He is also a Co-Investigator on the large Wellcome-funded “Correlates of Protection against Paratyphoid (COP-PT)” programme led by Prof Pollard.

His research integrates translational vaccinology, controlled human infection models, and immunological correlates of protection to accelerate vaccine development for neglected and emerging infectious diseases.

Professor Patricia Kingori is a Wellcome Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, a Professor of Global Health Ethics at the University of Oxford’s Ethox Centre and a Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College.

Professor Kingori’s research explores the intersection between the Sociology of Science and Medicine. She has studied the ethical issues experienced by clinical trial fieldworkers, Ebola treatment staff, emergency healthcare professionals, and frontline responders in humanitarian crises. As a health ethicist, Professor Kingori has also advised international organisations including the WHO and the UK government’s SAGE COVID-19 advisory group.

Professor Kingori’s work also seeks to reveal the systemic inequalities persisting in today’s global society. Her Wellcome research project “Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods” explores notions of authenticity as a global means of perpetuating privilege, while her “After the End” project investigates who decides when a crisis is over. Her work on the billion dollar “fake essay” industry in which uncredited Kenyan scholars write academic papers for students in the Global North, was the subject of the 2025 film The Shadow Scholars, directed by award-winning filmmaker Eloise King.

In 2021, Professor Kingori made history by becoming the youngest Black woman to receive a full professorship in the history of Oxford and Cambridge universities. Patricia has also been awarded a Merit Award by the University of Oxford in recognition of the standards of academic excellence in her role. In 2015, she was awarded a place on the prestigious Powerlist in recognition of her position as among <1% of Black British female academics employed by an Oxbridge institution.

Dame Carolyn Emma Kirkby, DBE, is an English soprano and one of the world’s most renowned early music specialists.

She has sung on over 100 recordings. Kirkby was a founding member of the Taverner Choir, and in 1973 began her long association with the Consort of Musicke. She took part in the early Decca Florilegium recordings with both the Consort of Musicke and the Academy of Ancient Music, at a time when most college-trained sopranos were not developing a vocal sound appropriate for early music.

She taught for many years at Dartington International Summer School, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, as well as the Bel Canto Summer School. In 2010 she became President of Dartington Community Choir. In 1994, she was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Music) from the University of Bath. On 21 January 2011 it was announced that Kirkby had been awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music, an award funded by the Privy Purse and given to an individual who has had a major influence on the musical life of the nation.

I am a planetary physicist and a Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Somerville. My research is focused on theoretical and numerical studies of the atmospheric dynamics and climate of exoplanets. This work covers a broad range of planetary climates, including the extreme atmospheres of close-in extrasolar gas giant (or “hot Jupiter”) planets, atmospheres of temperate Earth-sized rocky planets, and regimes in between. I completed my bachelor’s degrees in Geophysical Sciences and Physics at the University of Chicago and my Ph.D in Planetary Sciences in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. I was previously a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland before moving to Oxford in 2024.

Markos joined the University in September 2022 after spending three years leading the people strategy at the House of Commons. Prior to this, he spent over a decade advising on people practice and organisational development at London South Bank University, becoming its Group People Director in 2019. Throughout his career, Markos’ focus has been on improving workplace cultures, leadership capability, staff engagement and inclusion, and capability for digital transformation. Markos has a PhD in Modern European History from Kings College London, and has studied in his native Greece, as well as in Italy and the UK. He is a qualified executive coach, a Freeman of the Guild of HR Professionals, a graduate of the first cohort of McKinsey Senior Leadership Master Class for senior LGBT executives and a Stonewall Leadership programme alumnus.

Philip Kreager is Senior Research Fellow in Human Sciences at Somerville College; Tutor and Lecturer in Demography in the Institute of Human Sciences; and Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and Research Associate, School of Sociology, Oxford.

He is currently Sanofi Chair, Centre Virchow-Villermé, at the University of Paris-Descartes. He is also a Research Associate of the Department of Sociology in Oxford, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Institute of Ageing, and Honorary Professor, Institute of Ageing, University of Indonesia.

His current research, with Professor Kevin Baird of the Oxford-Eijkman Institute in Jakarta, is Determinants of treatment-seeking behaviour and equality of access to early detection and treatment averting severe and fatal malaria in rural, impoverished settings of Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia, a medical and anthropological demographic study of social structural and other impediments to malarial treatment, under the Wellcome-ISSF funding scheme. From September 2015-2018 he will be co-investigator with Professor Mark Harrison and others on a Wellcome Trust project in the history of medicine, Malaria and the Dilemmas of Development. In 2011-12 he was, with Giang Thanh Long, Sri Moertiningsih Adioetomo, P. Loyd-Sherlock, chief consultant to the National Team for Accelerating Poverty Reduction, Office of the Vice-President, Government of Indonesia (TNP2K). During 1999-2007 he was Director of Ageing in Indonesia, a multi-site longitudinal study of ageing in three communities, supported by the Welcome Trust. 

Apoorva is an ecologist, primarily interested in all aspects of human-animal interactions and applied conservation. Her DPhil research draws from interdisciplinary fields of natural and social sciences to investigate farmer-wildlife conflict and co-existence, crop losses and livelihood interventions in transitional forest landscapes. Her research is based out of the Central Western Ghats of Karnataka, India, alongside the marginal farmers of Indo-African Siddi community, local NGOs and government stakeholders. Her study adopts the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 Zero Hunger and Goal 15 Life on Land.

She is currently an associate at the Linnean Society of London, an honorary member of the Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) Consortium and a steering committee member of the IUCN SSC Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group. Her past work includes community-based species conservation, animal movement ecology, bioacoustics studies and documenting traditional ecological knowledge, both in terrestrial as well as marine realms.

Apoorva holds a Masters in Ecology (2013) from Pondicherry University and is the second Indian woman to have received the Global Fellowship in Marine Conservation by Duke University. For her Master’s research, she was funded by the International Otter Survival Fund (IOSF) to study the conflict situation between Smooth-coated otters and fishermen, and associated socio-economics in the Cauvery River, India. After her Masters and stint at Duke, she received a follow-up grant by Oak Foundation to collaborate with Conservation International, Brazil and founded the Marine Conservation without Borders initiative with her colleagues at Bahia, Brazil.

On returning to India, Apoorva worked as a Research Associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) on the India Biodiversity Portal project. She then went on to work as a Research Assistant at the University of Lethbridge, Canada for a year to study the acoustic communication of the endemic Adelaide’s warbler in Puerto Rico. On her return, she found the need to facilitate field research in India, engage local communities and children in field ecology studies, and thus began the Curious Naturalists Initiative in the Western Ghats. She also collaborates as a research affiliate with the Wildlife Information Liaison Development (WILD) Society in India.

Alongside research, Apoorva is also an active participant at policy based global forums such as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity- Conference of the Parties (UN CBD-COP) and Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) COP representing youth and indigenous communities for wildlife conservation. She is also a trained Natural History Illustrator and sketches the wonders of nature, which inspire her to keep going in the midst of all the socio-ecological crisis.

After finishing an MSc at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford University, and an MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, both with distinctions, I am now pursuing a DPhil in International Development.

I was awarded Somerville’s 2017 Principal’s Prize for academic excellence. My Masters at Oxford was funded by the Louis Dreyfus-Weidenfeld scholarship, while the MPhil-Dphil is supported by the university’s Indira Gandhi scholarship.

Prior to this, I worked for over 7 years as a journalist with a leading national newspaper The Hindu in Bangalore. I reported on topics ranging from higher education, technology and finance to more specialized focus areas such as the state of labour, work and wages of the vast urban working class in India. My occasional stints with reporting in rural areas got me interested in contemporary development theory. After this academic stint, I intend to return to the field of journalism with grounding and expertise in development studies. As a development expert, with the experience and know-how of mainstream journalism, I hope to be able to make vital interventions. My long-term goal is to be able to lead a team that can steer the agenda on development reporting, both in terms of grassroots reportage and incisive commentary.

My DPhil research focusses on the political economy of social protection programmes in India. It interrogates whether social sector schemes can ‘transform’ the social relations of production in village societies, and probes the determinants of such transformation. My research takes a comparative political economy approach to understanding transformative processes in rural India.

My research focuses on developing accessible mental health interventions for adults with different types of brain injuries, such as a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or brain tumours.

Specifically, my research aims to: 1) identify risk factors for poor mental health unique to brain injury populations; and, 2) develop and experimentally test novel mental health interventions that are accessible to brain injury survivors in light of cognitive impairments. My ultimate aim is to improve treatment options for mental health in neuropsychological populations. To achieve these goals, I use a mixture of advanced quantitative (mixed-effects models, structural equation models, risk prediction modelling) and qualitative (thematic analysis, interpretive description) methods.

After completing my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Canada, I completed my PhD training at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge with Dr Tom Manly. For my PhD, I developed and evaluated an intervention for depression and low mood in adults with acquired brain injury in a randomised controlled trial.

In the Translational Neuropsychology Group, I work with Prof Nele Demeyere on developing an improved cognitive care pathway for stroke survivors. In this role, I aim to elucidate the relationship between cognitive impairments and emotional outcomes following stroke, with an eye toward leveraging cognitive strategies as a means of improving mood and vice versa.

Afua was appointed Chief Financial Officer, Executive Director of the Bank of England aged 36 in 2019, making her the first black senior executive in the Bank’s 329 year history. Her tenure so far has seen the Bank handle unprecedented challenges, including Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the September 2022 mini-budget, and the ongoing inflation and cost of living crises. Her current responsibilities include developing the Bank’s strategy and the financial governance of the Bank’s c. £1 trillion balance sheet.

Afua also serves as the Bank of England’s co-executive sponsor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and co-executive sponsor for Climate Change disclosure. In 2021, she won CFO of the Year at the Women in Finance Awards UK, and in October 2022 she was named in the Powerlist, which profiles 100 of Britain’s most influential Britons of African heritage. She was a 2022 listee in the Kindness & Leadership, 50 Leading Lights UK campaign. Afua is a key note speaker and represents the Bank in the Community, with Businesses and at international fora e.g. International Monetary Fund, G20, World Finance Forum & COP.

Afua joined the Bank from Barclays Bank (2012-2019) where she was the Chief Financial Officer Mortgages and played a key role in Barclays’ strategic cost transformation program, TRANSFORM, whilst in the Investment Bank and in Group COO. Previously, during the Global Financial Crisis, she was an Investment Banker at UBS (2007-2012) in the Financial Institutions Group and in Mergers and Acquisitions, Group Strategic Advisory. After university, Afua qualified as a Chartered Accountant (ICAS) with Ernst & Young, London.

Afua matriculated at Oxford University one year early, gaining an undergraduate Master’s in Chemistry (2000-2004). She was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship in Organic Chemistry by Princeton University.

Of her Honorary Fellowship, Afua said, “To be invited to be an Honorary Fellow of Somerville is the greatest honour and took me completely by surprise!”

“I loved my time at Somerville. It played such an instrumental role in my career and I made lifelong friends.”

I have specific research interests in the etiology and management of sleep disturbance and the interaction between sleep disturbance and mental health.

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.

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.

Hi everyone! My name is Ben and I am your Sports Rep for this academic year. I am a 5th year medical student and in my spare time have been involved in college rowing, helped run a dance society and participated in university gymnastics. I used to play rugby and I do still occasionally boulder so I am enthusiastic about a wide breadth of sports!

I am really looking forward to promoting sports and physical activity in college, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about sports in college or the university more broadly. I am also in charge of college stash for the MCR for which there will be an opportunity to buy some lovely college branded clothing every term.

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/

Naijing Liu completed her PhD in linguistics at the Australian National University in 2023. Her research interests are phonology, prosody, and anthropological linguistics.

She works on endangered language documentation in the Manaslu region of Nepal and has been working as a research assistant on various anthropological and linguistics research projects in Botswana, Ethiopia, and Australia. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford.

At Oxford, her research focuses on the typology of prosody in tonal languages and examines prosodic interfaces through a fine-grained analysis of Tsum, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal.

ORCID：https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1892-8475

Personal web: https://naijingl.github.io/

Caroline is the Chief Operating Officer of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, where she provides leadership on strategy development and oversight of the School’s activities.

Caroline brings with her over 20 years’ experience in the infrastructure and energy project finance market, working on some of the largest energy transactions ever undertaken in both the conventional and renewables spaces and advising some of the largest energy companies in the world. Since 2021, she has been consistently recognised in the market for her work in the wind and energy transition sectors (Energy Transition Power List 2024, Wind Power List 2023, European Power List 2022, Women’s Power List 2021)

From 2023 until her move to Oxford, Caroline focussed on energy transition and sustainable finance, leading teams operating across the capital markets and in the ESG advisory space, as well as significant internal policy and process development. Her activities covered areas including financed emissions, transition finance, customer engagement and nature finance.

Caroline has served on the board of the International Project Finance Association (IPFA) since 2017, with notable contributions to their learning activities as well as DE&I, and on Pexapark’s Advisory Council since 2023. She is a regular and enthusiastic speaker at events around the City and further afield, including for names such as Inspiratia, Aurora, the Women’s Infrastructure Network, Reuters and FT Live.

Caroline holds an MPhys (Hons) from Somerville College, Oxford, where she also gained Half Blues in gymnastics and lightweight rowing. She is thrilled to continue her links to Somerville by appointment as a Senior Associate in 2025.