SOMERVILLE WAS RECOGNISED AS A UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SANCTUARY IN FEBRUARY 2021
DR ANWAR MASOUD AND HIS FAMILY
Extending access to Somerville will always be a fundamental priority of the College. I was so very proud, therefore, to see our Tutor and Fellow in Music, Samantha Dieckmann, gain national attention for her programme offering Oxford music students the chance to teach in local schools. A whole generation of young people have had their lives narrowed by lockdown, and Sam’s programme offers a pathway out of that cul-de-sac through music and culture more generally.
Home event featuring one of my great heroes, Lord Alf Dubs, he will come to Somerville with a full scholarship to read History and Economics.
Given the appalling crisis occurring in Afghanistan, it is only fitting that Somerville has been working harder than ever to make our College a place of refuge and transformative opportunity for vulnerable students and academics. We began in October by welcoming our first Sanctuary Scholar, Dr Marwa Biala from Tripoli, to study for an MSc in Radiation Biology. Then, in February, we learned that our joint application with Mansfield College to become the UK’s first Colleges of Sanctuary had been successful. Becoming a College of Sanctuary formalises our commitment to ensuring that Somerville offers a safe and welcoming space for refugees and asylum-seekers. It is also a living, breathing part of our culture. That much was evident when our Tutorial Fellow in Medicine, Professor Daniel Anthony, approached us in June to see if we could help his new colleague, the Yemeni neuropathologist Dr Anwar Masoud. Dr Masoud and his family had just arrived in the UK thanks to CARA, the Council for At-Risk Academics, and it was a great privilege not only to help Anwar and his family, but to see the Somerville community coming together in support of its founding principles. The work will continue. This October, we will welcome our second Sanctuary Scholars to Somerville. Asif is a phenomenal young Afghan who came to the UK as a refugee aged 14 having never attended school in his life. Now, thanks to his own extraordinary tenacity and happening upon a Somerville at
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In coming to Somerville, Asif is joining an outstanding community of young minds, just a few of whom I’ll mention here. Dr Cristian Trovato (2017, Computer Science) won Best Research Paper of 2020 from the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology for his doctoral research on computer modelling to understand specialised Purkinje cells in the heart. Also from the Department of Computer Science, Alex Pay (2019, Computer Science) won first prize in the Department of Computer Science’s annual Group Design Practical. In medicine, Abi Punt (2019, Medicine) and Eva Zilber (2015, Medicine) were both named proxime accessit for their performances in the First and Second BM examinations, respectively. Eva was also selected for the University of Oxford’s Academic Foundation Programme alongside her fellow finalist John Aaron Henry (2015, Medicine), which will enable both doctors to conduct research in an area of their choice while completing the Foundation Programme Curriculum. In postgraduate medicine, Young Kim (2016, DPhil ) was selected as the Nuffield Department of Medicine’s overall prize winner for best DPhil student based on publication records, references and the impact and novelty of his research. I was also delighted that Eoghan Mulholland, a Somerville JRF, won the Lee Placitio Research Fellowship in Gastrointestinal Cancer. In postgraduate humanities, Rebecca Bowen (2016, Medieval and Modern Languages) won the Society for Italian Studies’ 2020 prize best postgraduate thesis in Italian studies. She inspired us all in 2019 with her fundraising campaign to conserve our library’s holdings on Dante and other archival materials, so I have no doubt she’ll inspire us again in the future.
