College News People

People

Awards, honours, projects, significant lectures

Fellows and other senior positions

Professor Jeremy Baumberg, Professor of Nanoscience, led a multidisciplinary team to create a new type of detector for mid-infrared light that should improve prospects for biomedical sensing and imaging. The results were reported in the journal Science. Professor Clare Chambers published a new book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body (Allen Lane). You can hear her interviews about the book on BBC Radio 4’ s Woman’s Hour and BBC Radio 3’ s Free Thinking and read about it in iNews. Dr Frazer Christie, alongside co-author Professor Julian Dowdeswell, led work published in Nature Geoscience showing the sensitivity of Antarctica ’ s ice shelves to fluctuations in offshore sea ice. He also co-authored a ground-breaking new study revealing, for the first time, seasonal variations in the speed at which the Antarctic Ice Sheet flows towards the ocean. The findings of the study, published in The Cryosphere, imply that current estimates of Antarctic ice mass loss to the ocean may be significantly mis-estimated. Professor Roberto Cipolla, Professor of Information Engineering, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Fellowship of the Royal Society is made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists either from or working in the UK and the Commonwealth.

Dr Elizabeth Coker, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, lead the world’ s largest published study to date exploring effective drug combinations in breast, colon and pancreatic cancer. The resulting paper in Nature has been read over 58,000 times since February and describes multiple promising new treatments for these cancers. Professor Sarah Colvin, Schröder Professor of German, published her latest book, Shadowland: The Story of Germany told by its prisoners. Professor Rachel Evans was awarded the 2022 McBain Medal by the Joint Colloids Interest Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Society of Chemical Industry. This is an annual award given to recognise an early career researcher ’ s contribution to colloid and interface science.

Dr Julius Grower, Yates Glazebrook Fellow in Law, was appointed to an Associate Professorship at the University of Oxford, along with a Fellowship at St Hugh’ s College. Professor Nicholas Guyatt published a new book about a prisoner-of-war camp in Dartmoor during the British-American war of 1812. Published in April 2022, the title is The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain ' s Most Terrifying Prison (New York and London: Basic Books/Oneworld, 2022). Dr Sebastian Marino was awarded a University Research Fellowship by the Royal Society. This fellowship is given to outstanding scientists in the early stages of their research careers. In addition, he was awarded 150 hours of telescope time by the ALMA observatory, the largest observatory in existence, to study exocometary discs and search for evidence of Neptune-like exoplanets.

Dr Harry McCarthy, Junior Research Fellow in English, published a new book Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press 2022). Dr Olga Petri, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow, Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography published a book in June 2022 entitled, Places of Tenderness and Heat. The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St Petersburg. Mr Richard Pinel, Director of Music, has been made an Associate of the Royal School of Church Music. This is an honorary award, made for ‘ achievements in church music and/or liturgy of nationally recognised significance ’ and is a result of both his work at Jesus College and also as director of the Edington Festival of Music within the Liturgy. Dr Saumya Saxena, Postdoctoral Associate in Legal History, published her first book in May 2022, titled Divorce and Democracy: A History of Personal Law in Post-Independence India. Professor Marie Louise Sørensen, Director of Studies in Archaeology, was elected to the British Academy. She was one of 85 distinguished scholars to be made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2022. She also recently won The Prehistoric Society ’ s R.M. Baguley Award (2022) for best paper. Professor Benjamin Walton, Professor of Music History, was elected a Fellow of the Academia Europaea, a Pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Laws and Sciences.

New Fellows

Dr Ewa Marek obtained her BA and MA degrees from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow and her PhD (on carbon capture technology) from the GIG Central Mining Institute in Katowice. Dr Marek is an Assistant Professor who has been a University Teaching Officer in Cambridge for over three years. Prior to taking up her appointment in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) in the Department of Engineering, Cambridge, for four years. Dr Marek’ s research interests centre on transforming the chemical industry through the development of methods of production of green, bio-derived chemicals and ‘ energy vectors ’ that can be operated on a small (distributed) scale intermittently (on demand), in contrast to the established large-scale, continuous operation paradigm of the petrochemical industry. Production processes can be made more efficient and safer through the use of chemical looping approaches. An example is the development of a process for producing ethylene oxide, a chemical widely used in the healthcare sector, that is now being deployed in South America and Africa, continents which previously had to import all the ethylene oxide they used. Dr Paul Dominiak has been appointed as Senior Tutor. He completed a BA (Hons) degree in Early Modern Studies and Philosophy at the University of the South in the United States. He then came to the University of Cambridge, completing Tripos and then MPhil studies in the Faculty of Divinity while he trained for Anglican ministry at Westcott House. After serving his curacy in the Diocese of York, Paul spent eight years in higher education chaplaincy in Cambridge, first as Chaplain at Trinity College and then as Dean of Chapel at Jesus College. During those years, he completed a PhD from Durham University in Systematic and Philosophical Theology, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His contribution to university life was recognised in 2019 with an award from the Cambridge University Students ’ Union for exemplary partnership with students. For the past three years, Paul has worked as Vice Principal of Westcott House. Professor Christopher Marquis has an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Sociology and Business Administration from the University of Michigan, an MA in History and an MBA in Finance from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in History from the University of Notre Dame. He worked in the financial sector between his studies at Pittsburgh and Michigan and held faculty positions at Harvard and then Cornell before joining the Cambridge Judge Business School. Professor Marquis ’ s research focus is on the interactions between corporations, government bodies and society, and how these interactions can lead to socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes, with a particular focus on these interactions in China. His research is primarily quantitative, based on archival databases and analysis of survey data, although he also commonly uses qualitative methodologies such as interviews with stakeholders. Professor Marquis is already working with the Intellectual Forum (IF) and the Global Issues Dialogue Centre (GIDC). He is Senior Research Associate at the IF and will be contributing to a forthcoming GIDC event on Technology and Investment Solutions to Climate Change.

Dr Mary Brazelton is an Associate Professor in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine in the HPS Department and has been a University Teaching Officer since 2015. She is an Associate Member of the World History Group in the History Faculty and teaches and helps on selection committees in the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES). Dr Brazelton ’ s first degree was in History and Science at Harvard, and she subsequently studied for Masters and PhD degrees in History at Yale. Dr Brazelton ’ s research interests lie in historical intersections of science, technology and medicine in China and around the world. Her first book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China, published in 2019, examines the history of mass immunization in 21st century China. Her current projects include a study of the Sino-French Institute in Lyon, the first higher education institution to bring Chinese students to Europe, a collaborative exploration of the history of transportation technologies, and the early history of penicillin development in China. She served as a member of a Pandemic History Think Tank organised by the World Health Organisation West Pacific Regional Office, where she observed a marked difference in the interest shown by the media in the questions of how epidemics start and of how epidemics can be controlled.

Professor Simeon Zahl’s first degree was in History and Literature (Germany) at Harvard, and he subsequently studied for a PhD in Theology & Religious Studies at Cambridge. He was a Junior Research Fellow at St John ’ s College, Oxford, and then Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham for two years before taking up his present appointment. Professor Zahl’ s recent research has focused on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit (culminating in the publication of The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (OUP) in 2020), the contributions to theology of affect theory and cognitive science, the place of experience and emotion in Christian religious life, and the theological legacy of the Protestant Reformation. He is working on a new book on the theology of sin and its contemporary relevance. From 2018-22 he was Principal Investigator on the project Affect and Knowledge-Production in Theology and Religious Studies, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Dr Antiopi Koronaki’s first degree was in Architecture and Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. She then did an MSc at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and a PhD at the University of Bath. Dr Koronaki is an Assistant Professor in Design Computation and Fabrication in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Dr Koronaki’ s research interests lie at the intersection of architecture, engineering and materials with a focus on advanced fabrication and computational analysis methods for the design and construction of efficient structures. As a researcher in the Centre for Natural Material Innovation she has explored the potential of engineered timber for off-site manufactured schools in the UK to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry through the promotion of natural construction materials and modern methods of construction. Since 2014 she has been heavily involved in teaching

at higher education institution internationally and she has led several international workshops focusing on digital fabrication and design computation.

Dr Brian Sheil’s first degree was in Civil Engineering and his PhD in Geotechnical Engineering at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He moved on to postdoctoral appointments at the University of Oxford, including a highly prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, for which Professor Lord Mair was his mentor. Dr Sheil’ s research focuses on the development of new science and technology to optimise the efficiency, sustainability and safety of civil infrastructure construction. This involves the use of advanced numerical modelling, sensing systems, machine learning and real-time field monitoring to inform construction processes and improve design.

Junior Research Fellows

Dr Albert Chen obtained their PhD thesis through the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath. They graduated with a MSc from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in 2017, and prior to that with a BS with Honours from the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland in 2016. Since 2019 they have been a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences here in Cambridge. Dr Chen ’ s research is concerned with the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of major animal groups using a so-called ‘total evidence ’ approach. This uses advanced analytical methods to combine anatomical data from living and fossil animals with genetic data from the living to obtain a much clearer picture of a group ’ s evolution than could be gleaned from either strand of evidence alone. They applied these techniques to great success in their PhD studies to reconstruct, among other pathways, the evolutionary history of a diverse group of birds called the Strisores, which today includes hummingbirds, swifts and nightjars. Dr Chen ’ s work won them the Paleontological Society ’ s Allison R. “Pete ” Palmer Award in 2019, and has made them, in the words of one of their assessors, “ one of the go-to peer reviewers in [their] field” – a remarkable achievement for one at so early a stage in their research career. Dr Chen now proposes to continue their exploration of bird evolution, and in particular to assess how this unique and ubiquitous group of animals has responded to the major upheavals that have afflicted Earth over the last 100 million years or so, including the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event. Aside from the contribution this project will make to our understanding of birds, it also promises to give new and timely insight into the impact of climate change on biodiversity.

Dr Samuel Diener completed his PhD thesis ‘The Maritime Travel Book and the Collective Imagination ’ , carried out under the supervision of Professor Deidre Lynch at Harvard University. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015, with the highest honours major in his year. He was awarded the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for best undergraduate research project in any university field of study for his final year project on fictionality in the work of Nathaniel Mist. During his

doctoral study he received many awards and accolades, including the 2018 Derek Bok Center Award for Distinction and Excellence in Teaching, the 2020-21 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies dissertation research fellowship and the Bowdoin Prize for his article ‘Eighteenth-Century Pipes and the Erasure of the Disposable Object’ published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Dr Diener ’ s research draws on English, Portuguese and Spanish accounts of maritime exploration to examine the ways in which such books act as a material site for imaging national, racial, and gender identity anchored in collectivity. He specialises in early modern and eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history of the book. His research examines practices of reading, writing, and commodity consumption through which people imagined their identity from the early colonial period through Romanticism. His current book project, The Maritime Travel Book and the Collective Imagination, considers maritime exploration narratives from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, focusing on the ways that readers articulated collective identity both on and with the books they used. Dr Diener's new project, ‘Unacknowledged Things ’ , will use new materialist thinking and psychoanalytic object-relations theory to investigate quotidian material practices (such as pipe-smoking) and the link between commodities and an early-modern sense of selfhood.

Dr Max Long completed his PhD in History here at Cambridge, having previously completed the BA in History at Oxford (finishing in the top ten in his year) and the MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Cambridge (for which he was awarded a distinction). Dr Long works at the interface of science, education, entertainment and empire, and frames questions about these subjects in novel and exciting ways. His doctoral dissertation explores the transition from Victorian-era natural history to the emergence of a mass market for ’ nature ’ programming after World War II. Focusing on early nature films and radio broadcasts from the interwar period, including the natural history output of the early BBC, Dr Long explains how scientists, teachers and broadcasters captured a predominantly urban mass audience for nature programming, and he tells us what this meant both for the direction of science and education and for the popular understanding of the natural world. Work from this first project is already appearing in journals, and one of Dr Long ’ s articles was named runner-up in the Royal Historical Society ’ s Alexander Prize in 2021. Dr Long ’ s next book project, which he will develop during his Research Fellowship, explores the production and circulation of agricultural knowledge throughout the British empire from 1880 to 1960. Rejecting the framing of this period as one of decline for British agriculture, Dr Long emphasises the centrality of agricultural development (and boosting) to the British imperial project, and the British government’ s careful role in linking the agricultural prospects and interests of ‘domestic ’ and colonial spaces – especially through institutions like the Empire Marketing Board.

New Teaching Bye-Fellows

Dr Catherine O’Brien Dr Chris Town

Outgoing Fellows Dr Jonathan Linebaugh Dr Rebecca Flemming Professor Eyal Benvenisti Dr Julius Grower

Outgoing Research Fellows Dr C Eigen Dr E Robson

Outgoing Teaching Bye-Fellows Dr R Fasel Dr A Vohra

Outgoing College Post Doctoral Associates (CPDAs)

Dr H Becker-Lindenthal Dr L Coker Dr C Jeppesen Dr L Marshall Dr M Scroggs Dr E Stoakes Dr M Young

Outgoing French Lector M. T Seguy-Loubradou

Some of our new Fellows and academic staff (from left to right): Dr Ewa Marek, Dr Catherine O’Brien, Dr Brian Sheil, Dr Chris Town, Dr Max Long, Professor Simeon Zahl, Dr Mary Brazelton and Dr Albert Chen