Professor Lady Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome
LT, DBE, FRS, FRSE, FRAI, FRSB, ChFA
Professor Lady Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists and has most recently been the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University, tasked with raising the University’s profile locally, regionally and nationally whilst championing the economic growth and regeneration of North West England.
Since graduating from the University of Aberdeen in Human Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, Professor Black has had a varied and distinguished academic career, lecturing in Anatomy at St Thomas’ Hospital London and working as a consultant in forensic anthropology for both the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, undertaking forensic investigations in Iraq, Sierra Leone and Grenada. She was the lead forensic anthropologist during the international war crimes investigations in Kosovo. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at Dundee University.
Professor Black has written widely and has made regular media appearances, including on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and The Life Scientific. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Higher Education and Forensic Science and in 2021 entered the House of Lords as a crossbencher peer as Baroness Black of Strome. Professor Black is also the 65th President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and she is the lifetime Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy.
In March 2024 Professor Lady Black was appointed to the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in Scotland.
Dr Sandra Campbell Fellow for Access & Outreach and Tutor in Physiology
Sandra is the Fellow for Access and Admissions for St John’s, directing an extensive range of outreach projects including the pre- and post-GCSE Inspire Programme. She leads our team of access and admissions staff, all of whom are passionate about making a difference for disadvantaged pupils. She is also involved in other aspects of College life, including teaching, welfare, discipline, presidential collections, various committees and alumni interactions. Sandra has worked in higher education for the last 25 years. She has been a tutor in Physiology at Oxford for the past 13 years, teaching within the Medicine, Biomedical Sciences and Experimental Psychology courses for both the College and the University. Outside her teaching interests, she manages a team facilitating the development of laboratory imaging biomarkers for tumour detection and monitoring for use in patients.
Denise Cripps Director of Communication and Engagement
Denise works on a wide range of projects including strategy and governance as well as communications and engagement. She has a longstanding interest in education having worked in educational publishing for twenty-five years for Oxford University Press and Scholastic UK in editorial and senior management roles. She was also a local primary school governor for eight years and worked with Professor Maggie Snowling CBE, previous President of St John’s, on interventions looking at children’s language and learning difficulties and how best to ameliorate them. Denise was part of the team that published the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (OUP, 2018) and the Nuffield Nursery Language Programme (2019).
Professor Kate Nation Tutorial Fellow in Psychology and Provost for Academic Affairs
As Tutor for Psychology, Professor Nation is responsible for making the arrangements for the Experimental Psychology (EP) and Psychology, Philosophy & Linguistics (PPL) students at St. John’s. She provides undergraduate tutorials across all three years, covering a range of topics in psychology. She also contributes to the Psychology for Medicine course. She is College Advisor to a number of graduate students in College who are researching a wide variety of topics in psychology and neuroscience. In the department, she gives a 2nd year lecture course on Developmental Psychology and a 3rd year advanced course on Reading and Language: Development and Disorder. She supervises postgraduate students working in the field of psycholinguistics (the psychology of language), especially written language.
Professor Nation is based in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Broadly, her research is concerned with the psychology of language, especially reading and its development. She is interested in how children learn to read words and comprehend text, and more generally, the relationship between spoken language and written language. A key aim of her research at present is to specify some of the mechanisms involved in the transition from novice to expert. She also studies language processing in skilled adults, addressing the issue of how skilled behaviour emerges via language learning experience. Alongside her research on typical development, she studies language and cognitive processes in children with developmental disorders that impact on language and literacy development, including language impairment, autism and dyslexia.
Patrick Hayes Tutorial Fellow in English
Professor Patrick Hayes is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, where he teaches English Literature from the Romantic period to the present day. His current work considers debates about the nature and value of aesthetic education from the late eighteenth-century right up to the present.
Professor Stefan Kiefer Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science
Stefan has been the Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science at St John’s College since 2017 and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford since 2023. His teaching activities include delivering tutorials to first- and second-year undergraduate Computer Science students and supervising DPhil students. His main area of interest is computer-aided verification and the analysis of probabilistic systems. He completed his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in 2009.
Professor Lloyd Pratt
Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature
Lloyd Pratt is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at Oxford. He teaches and writes about American Literature and African American Literature from the nineteenth century to the present. He’s currently working on a book about the twentieth-century readers of one of America’s most influential nineteenth-century intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He’s also starting a new project about how the famous African American political figure and writer Frederick Douglass thought about the meaning and significance of Black literacy.
Finance
Kerry Jenkins
Bursar
at St John’s College
As Finance Bursar, Kerry is responsible for supporting the Governing Body of St John’s in its duties in managing the financial resources of the College. This includes the preparation of the statutory financial statements and organising the external audit. She also manage the finance bursary team who look after the day to day finance operations and includes: payroll, customer invoicing, student finance, payments to suppliers, management finance information, tax and government returns.
She is an Associate Chartered Management Accountant and a Charted Public Finance Accountant with over 25 years of operational and strategic finance, having worked in a variety of institutions in the HE sector as well as local government. Before joining St John’s, she was the Director of Finance & Resources at the Engineering & Design Institute (London).
Laurence Raran JCR Access Officer, St John’s College, Oxford
Hello, I am Laurence - I am the JCR Access Officer for St. John's College! As JCR Access Officer, I am committed to maintaining and developing the link between the undergraduate student body and the St. John's Access Team. I aim to increase student participation in access through increasing awareness and interest in the student body for access initiatives and programmes, particularly for Summer Schools and Open Days. I am incredibly passionate about access, having previously been VP in Projects for the Oxford SU's Target Schools scheme and hope to continue to develop the relationship between the undergraduates and access!
I am presently a student at St. John's College. I am in my third year studying a BA in Philosophy and Theology! I look forward to working with the Inspire Steering Group and the Access Team to supporting access in the college and in the wider university community.