INTERNAL ADVISORS
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.
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.
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 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).
Dr Jascha Achterberg
Career Development Research Fellow
Before joining St John’s College and the University of Oxford, I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and ironically also St John’s College). My work focused on the general principles underlying complex cognition in biological systems and artificial intelligence under the supervision of John Duncan and Matthew Botvinick, in collaboration with both Google DeepMind and Intel.
Dr Callum Munday Tutorial Fellow in Geography
I am a climate scientist and a physical geographer. My research focuses climate and climate change in Africa – the continent likely to endure the some of the worst effects of rapidly rising global temperatures. Before joining St John’s, I was a postdoctoral scientist on the REACH water security programme (East African climate change) and on the NERC funded DRYCAB programme (Southern African rainfall) based in the Geography department at Oxford. As part of these projects, I led several international field campaigns including in Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. During my postdoctoral research, I held visiting positions at the UK Met Office (2020) and at the University of Cape Town (2021). In 2021, I was appointed a Fellow by Special Election at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
Kristina McClendon Interim Director of Development
As Interim Director of Development, I lead the Development and Alumni Relations team, oversee the College’s strategy for fundraising and alumni engagement, and facilitate major gift fundraising activity. I work with my team as well as the entire College community of alumni, academics, administrators, and students to foster transformative educational experiences and fundraise for access and outreach, student support, scholarships, and early career posts. If you are interested in making a gift to St John’s College or would like to find out more about the impact of philanthropic donations, please get in touch.
Aaron Ung JCR Access Officer, St John’s College, Oxford
I am Aaron - I am the JCR Access Officer for St. John's College! I am currently in the final year of my German and Spanish degree.
I look forward to working with the Inspire Steering Group and the Access Team to support access in the college and in the wider university community.
EXTERNAL ADVISORS
Hong Zhou
Deputy Head of Maths, Gifted & Talented Coordinator and Inspire Teacher Lead at
the Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls
Originally born in China, Hong graduated with a degree in Environment Management from the University of Manchester. Her undergraduate dissertation was researching the the possible environmental impact of the largest hydroelectric dam in the world – the Three Gorges Dam in China.
After graduation, Hong was trained for a Secondary PGCE in Mathematics. Since then she has taught in both private and state secondary schools, including some in the most deprived areas outside London. She deeply believes that every individual, regardless of their background, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status, deserves access to high-quality education. Hong is a firm supporter for the St John's Inspire Programme, and she devotes her time promoting the programme to staff, students and parents within the school, as well as in the local communities.
Hong is also an advocator for promoting girls in chess. She has run numerous free chess tournaments to encourage primary and secondary girls to play chess.
Katherine Ryan, MBE
Former Headteacher Matthew Arnold School, Oxford and CEO Acer Trust
Katherine brings a lifelong commitment to improving the quality of education for all learners and has a particular interest in successful progression and continued leaning for learners of all ages and backgrounds. She was Headteacher of Matthew Arnold School, Oxford from 2006 to 2021 during which times she worked to ensure that all learners had high levels of aspiration leading to success and progression to positive destinations when they left the school. From 2015 to 2022 she led the development of a Multi Academy Trust, the Acer Trust, consisting of primary and secondary schools across Oxfordshire, with a core aim of ‘Achieving Excellence for All’. Prior to taking up the Headship of Matthew Arnold School, she was the Principal Adviser for Secondary School Improvement at Birmingham City Council. Her career includes advisory work in science education and education leadership in three Local Authorities, as well as teaching in a range of comprehensive schools across Oxfordshire and the West Midlands. She has also worked in Higher Education as Science Education Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Rachel Kruger Head Teacher, The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls, Ealing
Rachel has taught in comprehensive schools both in the UK and in South Africa, twice in girls’ only schools, and is currently the head of The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls in Ealing. She is passionate about girls’ only education. As a third generation university qualified female in her family, she works very hard to inspire girls to go to university and specifically into STEM careers. Her school has been part of the Inspire program for some time. At EWS, 90% of the Year 13 pupils go on to University, 25% to Russell Group universities and 40 % to follow STEM related courses. A significant number of the pupils are the first in their families to go to University. Rachel is a life-long learner with a very broad field of interests – she has degrees in Music, Maths, law and an MBA.
Susan Hammond Former Head Teacher, Whitmore High School, Harrow
After studying Natural Sciences and Chemical Engineering at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Sue joined BP and worked in various engineering and commercial roles in the UK, Europe and the USA. Sue then moved into teaching and was headteacher of Whitmore High School in Harrow, an inclusive community school with 1800 pupils, for 19 years. Sue was also Chair of Harrow’s High School Headteachers Group and Schools Forum and is committed to ensuring all young people have fair and equal access to a high-quality education.
Shamim Tong - Solicitor
St John’s Alumni
Shamim graduated with a degree in Jurisprudence from St. John's College, Oxford in 1997. She then qualified as a solicitor, worked at two of the largest law firms in London for over a decade, and then moved to California.
When Shamim was considering universities, there was no Inspire programme. The journey from inner-city Birmingham to Oxford was one that seemed inconceivable. However, Shamim’s teachers encouraged her to visit St. John's College on an open day. That visit was a turning point and she realised that Oxford University was a possibility for her. Shamim became the first person in her family to attend university. It is a privilege for Shamim to work with the Inspire Team to encourage the next generation to fulfil their potential.