Dr Tanmay Bharat
University of Oxford
Dr Hernán Burbano
University College London
Dr Hansong Ma
University of Cambridge
Dr Daniel Streicker
University of Glasgow
Dr Edze Westra
University of Exeter
Select a scheme, to find listings of current and past grant holders, their institutions and research projects.
Dr Tanmay Bharat
University of Oxford
Dr Hernán Burbano
University College London
Dr Hansong Ma
University of Cambridge
Dr Daniel Streicker
University of Glasgow
Dr Edze Westra
University of Exeter
Dr Sophie Ambler
University of Lancaster
Dr Stefan Hanß
University of Manchester
Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
University College London
Dr Rian Thum
University of Nottingham
Dr Alexia Yates
University of Manchester
Professor Jeremias Adams-Prassl
University of Oxford
Professor Paul Davies
University College London
Dr Nadine El-Enany
Birkbeck, University of London
Professor Emily Grabham
University of Kent
Dr Guido Rossi
University of Edinburgh
Dr Ana Caraiani
Imperial College London
Professor Heather Harrington
University of Oxford
Dr Richard Montgomery
University of Birmingham
Dr Nick Sheridan
University of Edinburgh
Professor Sasha Sodin
Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Liam Kofi Bright
London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Elselijn Kingma
University of Southampton
Dr Laura Quick
University of Oxford
Dr Emily Thomas
Durham University
Dr Joseph Webster
University of Cambridge
Dr Judith Bovensiepen
University of Kent
Dr Emily Dawson
University College London
Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite
University of Birmingham
Dr Nisha Kapoor
University of Warwick
Dr Lucy Mayblin
University of Sheffield
Dr Kate Britton
University of Aberdeen
Dr Enrico Crema
University of Cambridge
Dr Jessica Hendy
University of York
Dr Jane Kershaw
University of Oxford
Dr Ben Russell
University of Edinburgh
Dr Artem Bakulin
Imperial College London
Dr Thomas Bennett
University of Cambridge
Dr Kim Jelfs
Imperial College London
Dr Daniele Leonori
University of Manchester
Dr Silvia Vignolini
University of Cambridge
Dr Gabriella Conti
University College London
Professor James Fenske
University of Warwick
Dr Xavier Jaravel
London School of Economics and Political Science
Professor Friederike Mengel
University of Essex
Professor Benjamin Moll
London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Jessica Boland
University of Manchester
Dr Rainer Groh
University of Bristol
Dr Hannah Joyce
University of Cambridge
Dr Camille Petit
Imperial College London
Dr Alister Smith
Loughborough University
Dr Sarah Batterman
University of Leeds
Professor Christina Hicks
Lancaster University
Professor Robert Hilton
Durham University
Dr Fiona McConnell
University of Oxford
Dr Philippa Williams
Queen Mary, University of London
Professor Marc Alexander
University of Glasgow
Dr Emma Bond
University of St Andrews
Dr Merve Emre
University of Oxford
Professor Martin Eve
Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Joe Moshenska
University of Oxford
Dr Amin Benaissa
University of Oxford
Dr Myles Lavan
University of St Andrews
Dr Alex Mullen
University of Nottingham
Dr Amy Russell
Durham University
Dr Shaul Tor
King’s College London
Dr Juliet Biggs
University of Bristol
Dr Stephen Brusatte
University of Edinburgh
Dr Heather Graven
Imperial College London
Dr Babette Hoogakker
Heriot-Watt University
Dr Amanda Maycock
University of Leeds
Dr Alis Deason
Durham University
Dr Simone De Liberato
University of Southampton
Dr Katherine Dooley
Cardiff University
Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair
University of Manchester
Dr John Russo
University of Bristol
Dr Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos
University of Oxford
Professor Chris Hanretty
Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Sophie Harman
Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Lauren Wilcox
University of Cambridge
Professor Lea Ypi
London School of Economics and Political Science
Professor Emily S Cross
University of Glasgow
Dr Stephen Fleming
University College London
Dr Claire Haworth
University of Bristol
Dr Harriet Over
University of York
Professor Nichola Raihani
University College London
Dr Erika Balsom
King’s College London
Dr Daisy Fancourt
University College London
Dr Ian Kiaer
University of Oxford
Dr Peter McMurray
University of Cambridge
Dr Tiffany Watt Smith
Queen Mary, University of London
Classics
Dr Amin Benaissa
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
Amin Benaissa is one of three General Editors of the world-renowned Oxyrhynchus Papyri at Oxford. He is a wide-ranging classical scholar who combines the technical skills of papyrology with the literary and historical acumen required to place the texts and documents he studies in their broader cultural and historical contexts. He has edited over a hundred literary texts and documents from various collections. He is known for his 2012 work on Rural Settlements of the Oxyrhynchite Nome, an extensive resource for the study of the historical geography and rural society of Graeco-Roman Egypt. In 2018 he published his second major book, an edition with translation and commentary of the fragments of the first-century CE epic poet Dionysius. Dr Benaissa’s next project, an intellectual biography of Apion, promises to be a major contribution to the study of the literary and religious culture of Roman Alexandria.
Dr Myles Lavan
School of Classics, University of St Andrews
Myles Lavan’s monograph, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013), explores metaphors of enslavement in Latin texts to demonstrate how the Roman elite construct their relationship with their Imperial subjects as one of control by a superior culture. He thus challenges the prevailing scholarly consensus which regarded the early Roman Empire as committed to an integrationist mission. In this and other works, Dr Lavan brings to bear the expertise of a sensitive critic of Latin literature, combined with an historian’s control of both source-based and model-based methodologies. His quantitative and probabilistic approach to long-standing problems in Roman history shows what can be done with computational models in the study of the pre-modern world, and will be developed further in forthcoming publications.
Dr Alex Mullen
Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham
Alex Mullen’s landmark study Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean (2013) transformed the field. Analysing a broad range of archaeological material as well as written texts, she offers an integrated account of cultural influence and cultural change across a very extended period, emphasising the importance of contact between Southern Gaul and Italy from an early date. Dr Mullen has also made contributions to the study of language use in Britain in the pre-Roman and Roman periods. Her innovative ERC project on the Latinization of the Northwestern Roman provinces (LatinNow) builds on this phenomenal range of expertise, bringing together a group of specialists to study a still broader geographical area, in order to shed new light on the relationship between language use and identities across a broad swathe of the Roman Empire.
Dr Amy Russell
Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University
Amy Russell’s first book on the Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome won the 2017 C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit. Making a pioneering use of spatial theory, it showed that while it has been recognised that the language of the ‘public’ helped shape the construction of the ‘private’ in domestic space, reciprocally the ‘private’ intruded on ‘public’ space in complex and revealing ways. Her forthcoming publications are a monograph, Senatorial Monuments and Political Identity, and an edited volume on The Roman Republic and Political Culture. In 2019, she is leading a Major Project at Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study, bringing together an interdisciplinary team to explore how ‘The People’ as a unified political entity is defined and operates. Her new project will enlist new institutional theory in a major re-examination of the Populus Romanus.
Dr Shaul Tor
Departments of Classics and Philosophy, King’s College London
Shaul Tor’s work to date has focused largely on Presocratic writers, and is marked by its combination of meticulous textual analysis and broad creative imagination. In his major monograph, Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology, and in a clutch of articles, Dr Tor sets the surviving fragments of the Presocratics in their wider cultural context, reading Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus alongside the poet Hesiod, and challenging the assumption that, in the Greek context, critical reasoning and divine revelation are incompatible. His work can take single-sentence fragments and entirely recast our understanding of their authors. It has made a major contribution to the ‘theological turn’ in the study of Greek religion. Further articles develop new ways of understanding Hellenistic Pyrrhonian Scepticism and the appeal of ancient Pyrrhonism in relation to central questions in contemporary philosophy.
Earth Sciences
Dr Juliet Biggs
School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Juliet Biggs isageophysicist who uses satellite geodesy to investigate volcanic and tectonic processes. Having developed a method to use satellite radar to measure rates of active fault movement, she widened her focus to volcanic processes. She developed methods to identify, measure and model deformation in satellite-based global surveys of volcanoes and to integrate other observations. Such systematic work enabled her to quantify links between deformation and eruption. Dr Biggs has shown thatfew eruptions occur without observable deformation and that many volcanoes hitherto thought to be dormant are undergoing deformation. Her work has led to the establishment of the Global Deformation Database Task Force. A foremost researcher on volcano geodesy she is developing machine-learning algorithms to identify deformation that mightindicate pending eruptive activity. She also works closely with space agencies and volcano observatories in developing countries.
Dr Stephen Brusatte
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Stephen Brusatte is an earth scientist who is transforming our understanding of evolution on long timescales. Working mostly in the field of dinosaur palaeobiology, he has contributed a series of new insights into the nature and drivers of major evolutionary transitions. His work has shown that the evolution of birds from dinosaurs was in fact a gradual process, but that once flight was established a rapid burst in bird development was enabled. This is now providing a model for transitions in other groups. Dr Brusatte’s work is characterised by creative approaches that draw on concepts and techniques from diverse areas of biology, geology and computing, and include rigorous numerical approaches to large datasets, and use of new imaging techniques. Another hallmark is his approach to public engagement, including advisory roles with the BBC and National Geographic, and popular science books.
Dr Heather Graven
Department of Physics and Grantham Institute, Imperial College London
Heather Graven is a climate scientist who has pioneered the application of radiocarbon in studies of the global carbon cycle; for example, by quantifying the emissions of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from human activities and by placing new and independent constraints on the oceanic uptake of atmospheric CO₂. Her research on understanding the relationship between human activities, the global carbon cycle and climate change has been embraced by the IPCC, on behalf of which she helps to organise the biogeochemical Earth System Model intercomparison experiments to inform future assessment reports. Dr Graven will use this award to quantify the uptake of CO₂ by terrestrial ecosystems with an emphasis on revealing and understanding the mechanisms at play. She also conducts a wide range of outreach and media activities and in doing so has become an ambassador for climate change research.
Dr Babette Hoogakker
Institute of Life and Earth Sciences, Heriot-Watt University
Babette Hoogakker has expertise in palaeooceanography, especially in understanding circulation and chemistry of past oceans and links to CO₂ in the geological past. She pioneered new methods to reconstruct oxygen concentrations in past oceans using isotopic measurements from fossilised marine foraminifera, a great achievement since the assessment of past oxygen levels in the ocean has proved exceptionally challenging. Her work highlighted changes in the oxygen content of ocean waters during glacial-interglacial periods at the time of the last ice age, critical for understanding the link with the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the course of glacial episodes. Dr Hoogakker is known for her pioneering new methods for understanding climate change and will focus part of her future research on studies of organic carbon in foraminifera to understand past ocean productivity, carbon cycling and climate change.
Dr Amanda Maycock
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds
Amanda Maycock is a renowned climate scientist who uses a combination of atmospheric measurements and numerical models to understand interactions between atmospheric chemistry, radiative transfer and climate dynamics. Her work has led to substantial developments in our understanding of the role of the stratosphere in the climate system, including how changes in the concentration of stratospheric trace gases affect global and regional surface climate. Dr Maycock has taken leading roles in several international science programmes within the atmospheric sciences, establishing and developing new areas of investigation. She contributes to the International Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, which monitors the successes of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and the IPCC, which informs the multilateral discussions under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Physics
Dr Alis Deason
Department of Physics, Durham University
Gaining an insight into our place in the Universe is one of the major challenges of modern astronomy and galaxies are one of its key building blocks. Alis Deason’s pioneering work has shown how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbour, Andromeda, provide a unique opportunity to study galaxy formation in action. Dr Deason pioneered studies of the Milky Way halo using large survey data coupled with cosmological simulations. She was able to show that the Milky Way has probably experienced just one big accretion event in the past and overall has had fewer large mergers than would be typical. Her work on galactic halos has wider significance in that they may contain the keys to understanding the nature of the dark matter of which they largely consist.
Dr Simone De Liberato
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton
Simone De Liberato is a physicist who works in solidstate cavity quantum electrodynamics. He has played a substantial role in developing the research field of ultra-strong light-matter coupling, starting from theoretical analysis but leading to collaborative worldleading experiments with a number of other groups. In addition to his prediction of the breakdown of the Purcell effect he has anticipated a wide range of related phenomena that are now being pursued experimentally. His research on intersubband polaritons and on localised phonon polaritons is pointing towards a new generation of mid-infrared and terahertz source and devices. His broadly inclusive and innovative approach are also evident in his public engagement work (including with the BBC), in his co-founding several successful technology businesses, and in his role as an advocate for entrepreneurship amongst scientists.
Dr Katherine Dooley
School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University
Katherine Dooley has played a key role in the development of instrumentation for the LIGO interferometers that made the monumental discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes and colliding neutron stars. She was one of a small handful of scientists in residence at the sites who carried out the creative work – in quantum optics, sensing and control – needed to commission the low-noise detectors. Dr Dooley’s early work was critical to increase the sensitivity and stability of the LIGO and GEO600 laser interferometers and achieve record strain sensitivities. Her Prize will support a quest to develop challenging new technologies that will increase the length of stable observational runs that are possible with interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.
Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair
School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science and the National Graphene Institute, University of Manchester
Rahul Raveendran Nair is a materials physicist who has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of the physical properties of graphene and other two-dimensional materials. His discovery that the optical absorbance of graphene is ‘quantised’, given by the product of the fine structure constant, α, and π came as a surprise and furthered our understanding of the optoelectronic properties of graphene. Another remarkable discovery of his research is the superpermeable water flow through graphene oxide membranes. This work has led to new uses of graphene and graphene oxide in tuneable molecular sieving and is leading to the development of next-generation smart membrane technologies for applications such as water filtration, organic solvent nanofiltration, seawater desalination and in artificial biological systems.
Dr John Russo
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
John Russo has combined powerful computational and theoretical techniques to address a suite of fundamental problems in soft condensed matter, and especially the structure of phase changes. In many cases these have challenged long-held assumptions, such as his finding that orientational order, rather than density, triggers crystallisation of hard and soft spheres. He has also contributed to the fundamental understanding of the glass transition in two and three dimensions. Applying aspects of this thinking to a substance as familiar as water, he and his collaborators have identified a hitherto unknown metastable form of ice, and explained some of waters many anomalous behaviours with a novel two-state model of its local structure. These ideas and methodologies create an opportunity to deepen our understanding of nucleation, in partnership with strong soft matter experimental groups worldwide.
Politics and International Relations
Dr Ezequiel González Ocantos
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
In Latin America, judges have become key architects of fundamental rights. This represents a major transformation of the role of the judiciary in this region, one with profound implications for the distribution of power in society. In Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial change and human rights trials in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ezequiel González Ocantos providesarigorous explanation of this transformation and its implications. This research has made a substantial contribution to debates about the nature of judicial power, the role of social mobilisation and the diffusion of new paradigms of rights adjudication in shaping the behaviour of courts. It has also informed briefs filed by international NGOs before the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission. His future research will explore the consequences of another major
transformation in the political involvement of Latin American courts: the anti-corruption judicial activism that has led to the resignation (Guatemala 2016), impeachment (Brazil 2016), indictment (Argentina 2017), and conviction (Brazil 2018) of former and sitting
presidents.
Professor Chris Hanretty
Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London
Chris Hanretty is a leading scholar of public opinion, representation, legislative behaviour, and in the use of advanced statistical methods to study these phenomena. He has published influential work on non-majoritarian institutions, in particular quantitative work on courts and broadcast media. He has shown a relationship between appointments and judicial behaviour in West-European constitutional courts as well as the lack of such a link in the UK. His main contribution is in developing techniques for estimating constituency opinion in the UK, especially non-survey data, which can be used to understand a variety of problems of representation, such as MP voting patterns, as well as forecasting election outcomes. He is best known for having produced estimates of how each Westminster constituency voted in the 2016 EU membership referendum, estimates which have been cited repeatedly in parliamentary and public debates. He will be able to use the funds from the Prize to continue his research into constituency opinion by matching new data and estimating refined statistical models.
Professor Sophie Harman
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London
Sophie Harman is established in three different disciplines, international relations, global health and the comparative political economy of development. In doing so she has built an original research agenda that critically examines international policy towards fighting HIV/AIDS, international developmentin Africa and gender and visibility. Her use of film-making as a tool of social science research is yet more evidence of innovation and originality. Her research has produced a series of ground-breaking journal articles, and research driven single authored and jointly written books. Her work has pioneered much needed research into hitherto understudied aspects of the global south and has a strong public engagement component. In 2018 she was awarded the Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar by the Political Studies Association, and in 2019 was nominated for the BAFTA for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer.
Dr Lauren Wilcox
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Lauren Wilcox has drawn upon and added to feminist theories of embodiment to make an important contribution to our understanding of political violence within the framework of international relations. In doing so, she has opened up a surprisingly neglected area that will now benefit from her pioneering work, encouraging further study of the place of the embodiment of the subject in war and critical security studies. Her work in this field has already had significant impact and has helped to shape new debates in feminist and critical international relations. Building upon this, but taking some of its insights further, she is presently working on a project concerning ‘war beyond the human’, exploring the significance of the current posthuman moment as it affects the technologies, but also the ethics of war – and above all provoking us to think how we should understand these processes and the residues of the categories of thought with which they have been associated.
Professor Lea Ypi
Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science
Lea Ypi has made significant contributions to a number of debates in contemporary political theory. In her work on global justice, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP), she has developed a distinctive theory of cosmopolitanism that sheds new light on the relationship between political theory and political practice. Her most recent work, The Meaning of Partisanship (OUP, co-authored with Professor Jonathan White), explores the role of political parties in public life. This is a topic that has been unduly neglected by political theorists. The Meaning of Partisanship has created and defined a new normative agenda, stimulating others to debate these vital issues. In addition, Professor Ypi has made contributions to the interpretation of Kant and Marx, the ethical issues surrounding immigration, and the nature and implications of colonialism, among other topics. She is a winner of the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in Political Science.
Psychology
Professor Emily S Cross
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow
Emily Cross has established herself as a leading authority in social robotics, working at the cutting-edge of a rapidly expanding field. Her research interests envelope the arts, science and technology and she is equally comfortable in and between domains that some regard as antithetical. She uses theory and methods from a number of disparate fields, including social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, empirical aesthetics and robotics. She addresses fundamental basic scientific questions about perception, action and the perception of action, exploring the role of experience and expectation in kinaesthetic empathy. The relevance of this for ‘real world’ issues is both obvious and profound. Professor Cross already has a strong international reputation and is regularly invited to consult, advise and give keynote presentations and lectures around the world.
Dr Steve Fleming
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London
Steve Fleming is an outstanding scientist whose work addresses the psychological processes and neural systems that support metacognition. He approaches this topic in an interdisciplinary fashion, using a range of psychological, physiological and neuroimaging methods, and has been keen to draw out the clinical implications of his work. Dr Fleming shaped the burgeoning field of metacognitive neuroscience a few years ago, by co-editing the first book on the topic with Chris Frith (The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition, 2014). He often tackles scientific problems that have been thought to be purely philosophical, and his future research plans include explorations of links between metacognition and consciousness.
Dr Claire Haworth
School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol
Claire Haworth is an exceptionally talented psychologist, and a rising star in the field of Behavioural Genetics. In her early career, she was funded by two consecutive fellowships; an interdisciplinary fellowship from the MRC and ESRC, and a research fellowship from the British Academy. Her research focuses on mental health and wellbeing and the dynamic interplay between genetic and environmental influences. Her groundbreaking work has demonstrated how genetic influences can change as we get older or when we are exposed to different social and environmental conditions. Results of Dr Haworth’s studies highlight the ways in which genetic risks impacting on mental health might be mitigated by behavioural interventions. She was awarded the British Psychological Society's Spearman Medal in 2017, for outstanding published work in psychology.
Dr Harriet Over
Department of Psychology, University of York
Harriet Over completed her postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and since then has established herself as an acknowledged expert on social learning. Her research focuses on how children learn about the social world through observation and imitation. Using a combination of creative laboratory experiments and observational research in naturalistic settings, drawing on anthropology as well as developmental and social psychology, her work has moved the study of imitation away from a focus on cognitive, instrumental outcomes to recognising its pivotal role in building social relationships and understanding intergroup relations. She has published in leading journals in social, developmental and comparative psychology, won a number of prestigious awards and been successful in attracting substantial external funding.
Professor Nichola Raihani
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London
Nichola Raihani’s research explores the causes and consequences of variation in social cognition and behaviour, both from a proximate psychological perspective and from an ultimate evolutionary perspective. She undertook a four-year research fellowship at the Institute of Zoology, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship prior to her appointment as Professor in 2017. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from social, evolutionary, and clinical psychology, as well as evolutionary biology, behavioural economics and anthropology. Professor Raihani has developed an international network and publishes regularly both in popular science outlets and high quality academic journals. A major focus of her research now is to explore the socio-cognitive and behavioural consequences of variation in paranoid ideation.
Visual and Performing Arts
Dr Erika Balsom
Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
Erika Balsom has established an international reputation for cutting edge research, especially in the interdisciplinary spaces her work has opened up between film studies, art history, aesthetics and ethics. Her first book, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2013), examines the transformations of cinema after digitisation. Her second major monograph, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art (Columbia University Press, 2017), took up related questions of distribution, circulation and reproducibility. She has further co-edited an influential anthology Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016). Dr Balsom has also been one of the youngest scholars invited to deliver a prestigious Kracauer Lecture at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. In 2017, she was invited to be film curator in residence at the GovettBrewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, resulting in her commissioned essay An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (New Plymouth, New Zealand: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, 2018).
Dr Daisy Fancourt
Department of Behavioural Science and Health, University College London
Daisy Fancourt previously worked as a professional pianist while completing her doctoral thesis in Psychoneuroimmunology. Since, her research has explored the psychological and physiological impact of the arts on our health. She has worked as Arts Manager at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, and published the first practical textbook, Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her project over the next few years is focused research that combines diverse disciplinary approaches to explore the impact of arts engagement for individuals and society. Dr Fancourt’s work will analyse national data to explore how arts engagement across the lifespan is linked with mental health/cognition/wellbeing, the interrogation of why we see these results, and research to support the scaling up of successful projects. Her work includes collaboration with UK Arts Councils, Public Health England, NHS England and the World Health Organisation.
Dr Ian Kiaer
The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
Ian Kiaer combines a rigorous academic career with considerable international standing as an artist. His work researches architectures and specific buildings that act as resonant carriers for meaning. His process and practice takes form in extended mixed media, including painting, drawing and wall texts, juxtaposed and installed with projected film and photographs, architectural models and adapted objects, bringing together delicate and vital correspondent elements and traces to act as carriers of often-fractured narratives – charged to discover questions of wholeness and permanence. His new work will research the brutalist structure of a particular panoramic restaurant in Lisbon. Designed by Chaves de Costa, it is a building that has moved from a model of luxury during the Estado Novo dictatorship, to its present abandoned state as a site for graffiti, and parkour.
Dr Peter McMurray
Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist, media artist and lecturer at Queens' College, University of Cambridge.
His research focuses on music, sound and ritual in contemporary Islam with special emphasis on migration and refugee movements in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. He is currently completing a book and media project entitled Pathways to God; The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin, whilst other recent publications have covered the influence of 'viral' music videos on social media channels, the importance of tape in the development of sound recording history, and the use of cartography in the mapping of sound and location. Dr McMurray plans to expand his research into further work looking at the ways music, sound, noise and silence play significant roles in the lives of refugees.
Dr Tiffany Watt Smith
Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London
Tiffany Watt Smith’s research in emotions, the body and performance draw on her experience as a theatre director. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between theatre and science. Her book On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell-Shock (2014) has become a key reference point for scholarship in the history of emotions and theatre studies. Her next book, written for a general audience, The Book of Human Emotions (2015), argues for the importance of understanding the history and politics of our ideas about emotions, and has had an international reach. Dr Watt Smith’s future project, on the performance of sleep, will offer original insights into the historical intersections between science, medicine and performance. She has a significant international and public profile, working regularly for broadcasting media, newspapers and journals, and on theatre projects that intersect with her research.
Dr Tom Baden
School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex
Dr Katie Field
Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds
Professor Nick Graham
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
Dr Kayla King
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Dr Andrea Migliano
UCL Anthropology, University College London
Dr Andrew Arsan
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Toby Green
Department of History and Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King’s College London
Dr David Motadel
Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Lucie Ryzova
Department of History, University of Birmingham
Dr Alice Taylor
Department of History, King’s College London
Professor Pinar Akman
School of Law, University of Leeds
Dr Ana Aliverti
School of Law, University of Warwick
Professor Fiona de Londras
Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Professor Rosie Harding
Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Professor Jeff King
UCL Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Anders Hansen
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
Dr Oscar Randal-Williams
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
Professor Dominic Vella
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Hendrik Weber
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Dr Naomi Appleton
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
Dr Joel Cabrita
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
Dr John Michael
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick
Professor Ian Phillips
Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham
Dr Bryan W Roberts
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method,
London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr David Clifford
Department of Social Statistics and Demography,
University of Southampton
Dr Des Fitzgerald
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Dr Suzanne Hall
Department of Sociology, London School of Economics
and Political Science
Dr Alice Mah
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Dr Maria do Mar Pereira
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Biological Sciences
Dr Tom Baden
School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex
Tom Baden studies how the visual system samples and processes information, in particular how the neural representation of the outside world evolves as it passes from the retina to the brain, resulting in specific behaviours. To analyse the visual computations performed by the retina, he combines electrophysiology and computational modelling with advanced imaging techniques such as 2-photon imaging of genetically encoded biomarkers. His groundbreaking research discovered that different output synapses belonging to the same sensory neuron can systematically transmit a different signal to different postsynaptic partners. He thus addressed a longstanding question in neuroscience of how a limited number of neurons can give rise to a functionally diverse output. Dr Baden is also co-founding director of TReND in Africa, a non-profit organisation set up to advance education in neuroscience and biological research in African universities. He is in addition an active proponent of open source hardware and the founder of Open-Labware.net.
Dr Katie Field
School of Biology, University of Leeds
Katie Field has made important contributions to our understanding of the functional and evolutionary significance of mycorrhizal symbioses. She has shown that the formation of mutualistic symbioses between plants and fungi was a pivotal event in the colonisation of land by plants between 450 and 500 million years ago. Dr Field has developed isotope tracer methods that have directly quantified the contribution of fungal symbioses to the carbon budget of plants related to the earliest land colonisers. She has shown that the symbioses were more complex than earlier studies of mycorrhizal associations had indicated. Dr Field’s research has thus changed the way we think about symbioses in early land plant evolution – one of the key transformative events in the Earth’s history. Her work has furthered our understanding both of land plant colonisation and its wider effect on the Palaeozoic climate and the subsequent events that shaped the contemporary biosphere.
Professor Nick Graham
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
Nick Graham’s work as a marine ecologist has made key contributions to our understanding of how coral reefs respond to the effects of warming and fishing. In so doing he has framed novel, practical approaches to the management of coral reefs for their recovery and protection. In particular, he has provided major insights into what causes coral reefs to acquire new ecological states. These insights have arisen through tackling large-scale questions around disturbance ecology, management and resilience science and social-ecological systems. Working together with quantitative social scientists, Professor Graham has combined ecological and social data in order to understand both how coral reef ecosystems function, and the social drivers of ecosystem change. His research, highlighted on world media, has had considerable impact beyond the academic community: he has demonstrated in a very measured and analytical way the plight of reefs and the need to work toward their conservation.
Dr Kayla King
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Kayla King has gained international acclaim for her work in the field of evolutionary ecology, focussing on host-parasite interactions. She has made significant and original contributions to our understanding of co-evolution, adaptation, infectious disease, symbiosis and the maintenance of diversity. Her research has examined the relationship between genetic diversity, sex and infection; her investigation of host-parasite co-evolution in a snail infection model has provided the most direct experimental evidence in nature so far for the Red Queen Hypothesis (for organisms to survive, they must constantly adapt in response to reciprocal adaptations in antagonistic organisms, such as parasites). Most recently, Dr King and her colleagues have used state-of-the-art genomics and the worm C. elegans to demonstrate that rapid evolution of friendly gut microbes can protect hosts from infection by parasites – a finding that has significant implications for our understanding of disease resistance mechanisms.
Dr Andrea Migliano
UCL Anthropology, University College London
Andrea Migliano’s work helps to solve the mystery of why humans have crossed the divide that allows knowledge and technology to accumulate, alone among Earth’s species. Her network-analysis studies of hunter-gatherer tribes demonstrate that humans routinely live alongside and exchange ideas, goods and services with people outside our immediate families. She has shown how these networks allow us to draw upon a vast reservoir of knowledge, skills and occasional good luck: our social organisation means we can exploit the collective wisdom of many people. Indeed, most of us are surrounded by technologies such as computers and mobile phones whose workings we don’t understand, and that no one person could produce in isolation. Her findings have important implications for innovation and problem solving in a highly globalised world, and at a time when humanity arguably requires greater technological advancement than ever before.
History
Dr Andrew Arsan
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Andrew Arsan is a cultural, political and intellectual historian of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East committed to an approach that transcends regional borders and disciplinary boundaries. His work has made significant contributions to debates on diaspora, British and French imperialism, and Middle Eastern political thought. He is a pioneer in the field of global intellectual history, which seeks to integrate thinkers in the non-West into histories of political thought long dominated by the European canon. The breadth, depth and subtlety of his scholarship command admiration and respect. His work is interdisciplinary history at its very best: it demonstrates his theoretical, empirical and linguistic mastery. His prize-winning book Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial West Africa explores the ambivalences of diasporic life by paying close attention to the choices and labours of those who migrate. Beautiful, elegant writing and precise, sensitive conceptualisation characterise his work.
Dr Toby Green
Department of History, and Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King’s College London
Toby Green is a historian of early pre-colonial Africa and Atlantic history. The Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (2012), based on archival and oral sources found in Spain, Portugal, West Africa and South America, changed our conception of the early history of the slave trade. Green showed that the scale of the trade from the Upper Guinea coast in the sixteenth century was far higher than previously thought and depended on creolised merchant networks spanning the Cape Verde archipelago and the northwest coast of Africa. Going beyond traditional quantitative and economic approaches, he has demonstrated the importance of African agencies and social structures in shaping Atlantic history. His forthcoming book, A Fistful of Shells, based on archives in nine countries, examines the history of money in West Africa, Africa’s role in creating the early modern global economy, and the role of early modern currency exchanges in creating global capital imbalances.
Dr David Motadel
Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science
David Motadel’s highly original body of work includes, notably, a book on Muslims under German rule in the Second World War, which ranges from Balkans to the Caucasus to North Africa, and an edited volume of essays on Islam in the European Empires, for which he wrote a scintillating, thought-provoking introduction. His work, drawing on literatures in a range of European and non-European languages, has opened up hitherto little-known fields of history. This pioneering work extends to research on exchanges of political culture between the Islamic world and the West, in particular a prize-winning study of the European tours of Persian rulers. In addition, Dr Motadel has led a number of collaborative projects on global history soon to emerge as monographs. His impressive academic output is complemented by regular contributions to public debate in, for example, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.
Dr Lucie Ryzova
Department of History, University of Birmingham
Lucie Ryzova works on the social and cultural history of modern Egypt. Her prize-winning first book, The Age of Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in Colonial-National Egypt (2014), concentrates on popular culture and local vernacular sources to establish Egyptian modernity as an experience deeply rooted in local processes and emerging in late-colonial era Egypt from the middle strata of society among a group known as the efendiyya. Fluent in both modern standard Arabic and Egyptian dialect, Dr Ryzova also has a special interest in vintage photographs and has published extensively on photographic heritage and ‘archive fever’ in Egypt, drawing on previously untapped and unknown private sources (whose future is far from secure). She therefore has a growing international reputation not only as an expert on the history of modernity at the local level in the late colonial context, but also as a historian of photography and the production of cultural heritage.
Dr Alice Taylor
Department of History, King’s College London
Alice Taylor is a medievalist with a particular interest in Scottish government and law. Her major (and first) work, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland (2016), offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the nature of the medieval state and is already recognised as the definitive history of Scottish law. The book employs pioneering methodologies and shows an acute awareness of the wider European context (which will be the focus of Dr Taylor’s next investigation). Reviewers have praised the book for its “level of scholarship and originality—of sheer intellectual capacity—across the entire range of levels in the discipline”, and heralded it as “a model of the power of history as a discipline”, “a landmark study”. Such praise would be unusual for books produced by senior established scholars, let alone a first monograph. Along with her other outputs, it has firmly established her one of the leading international experts in her field.
Law
Professor Pinar Akman
School of Law, University of Leeds
Pinar Akman works in the challenging and multidisciplinary area of competition law. Her particular expertise lies in the legal prohibition of abuse of a dominant position, on which she is a world-recognised authority. Her research is distinguished by the diverse methodologies that she has applied including: the extensive use of archival sources, quantitative studies on the usage of words and phrases by European Courts, comparisons between analogous concepts in contract and competition law and co-authoring an article with a political scientist. Her investigation of the historical foundations of EU competition law overturned conventional thinking on the subject while also challenging the European integration project itself. Professor Akman’s research agenda has now turned to the application of competition law in digital markets and the practices of technology giants such as Google and Amazon. This puts her right at the heart of the most important developments in both competition and commercial law.
Dr Ana Aliverti
School of Law, University of Warwick
Ana Aliverti has conducted pioneering comparative research on criminal law’s treatment of foreign nationals. She has combined doctrinal and socio-legal approaches to shed light on the criminalisation of migration and on the emerging roles – both instrumental and symbolic – of criminal law and criminal justice in a globalised world. Her work has helped establish the analysis of borders and of mobility as a new field of study in criminology. Her next project will examine how the criminalisation of migration is affecting UK domestic policing. The exceptional quality of her scholarship has been widely recognised: her book Crimes of Mobility (2013) was awarded the British Society of Criminology Best Book Prize for 2015; her article ‘Making people criminal: The role of the criminal law in immigration enforcement’ was judged the best article of the year in Theoretical Criminology in 2012; and she has also been the recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award.
Professor Fiona de Londras
School of Law, University of Birmingham
Fiona de Londras’s work on human rights law is internationally recognised and has influenced both the practice of law and its theoretical understanding. Her methodology is strongly interdisciplinary, pursuing a broad intellectual inquiry that coalesces around the place of human rights in contested policy areas – most notably, European counter-terrorism legislation and reform of the abortion law in Ireland. She skilfully and effectively combines theoretical analysis with ambitious empirical work, in particular in her study of counter-terrorism laws and policies. Her research has generated writing that speaks clearly and influentially to academics from other, diverse backgrounds, such as political theory, international relations and security studies. Crucially, her research is at the vanguard of debates on whether, and how, human rights shape contentious policy areas, and leads on to the more fundamental question about what rights are for and how an understanding of that can inform their structuring and application.
Professor Rosie Harding
School of Law, University of Birmingham
Rosie Harding explores the interaction of law with everyday life, particularly in the areas of family and social welfare regulation. Questions of sexuality and law, and questions relating to dementia and the law formed the subjects of two wonderful monographs: Regulating Sexuality (2011), and Duties to Care: Dementia, Relationality and Law (2017). Her research uses techniques from the social sciences to explore how areas of law relating to human rights, discrimination and the family interact with the broadest range of human experience. For example, her recent work on statutory wills has generated cross-disciplinary collaboration with geriatric psychiatrists as well as shaping the Law Commission’s approach to statutory wills in their current review of the topic. Her future research plans include work on legally relevant decision making by people with cognitive impairments, a polyphonic understanding of legality, and the regulation of adult social care. She is Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
Professor Jeff King
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Jeff King has undertaken groundbreaking work of great current relevance both for law and politics. His book Judging Social Rights gives a comprehensive defence of social rights in the law courts, winning the UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize in 2014. His work in international law resulted in his highly original book The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law: A Restatement, which examines the enforceability of debts of sovereign states where the funds have been used to harm or defraud their populations; the research has been cited extensively in academic literature, in UN reports and in a US court. Professor King is now writing a book about the social dimension of the rule of law, arguing that the rule of law concept entails an active state engaged in social protection rather than simply a restrained state acting only on the basis of clear, pre-announced rules.
Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Anders Hansen
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
Anders Hansen has solved very hard problems and opened new directions in areas of great impact in applied analysis, particularly his work on the complexity index, computation of spectra and compressed sensing. Notably, by introducing the solveability complexity index he has made a major contribution to the advancement of Smale’s programme on the foundation of computational mathematics and settled the longstanding problem of the computation of spectra. He has also contributed fundamental ideas to the mathematics of information; in particular, and in collaboration with Ben Adcock, a theory for compressed sensing, extending this to analogue signals and infinite dimensions and introducing important new concepts such as asymptotic incoherence and asymptotic sparsity that facilitate a better fit to real applications. Compressed sensing is a new data acquisition theory based on the discovery that one can use sparsity or compressibility to condense the information in a signal into a small amount of data.
Dr Oscar Randal-Williams
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Oscar Randal-Williams has established himself as a clear leader in the field of algebraic topology. Together with Soren Galatius, he has found a complete description of the cohomology ring of the stable moduli space of an even dimensional manifold. In particular they compute the rational cohomology of the moduli space in a range, thus extending to higher dimensions the celebrated work by Ib Madsen and Michael Weiss on the Mumford conjecture for the moduli space of Riemann surfaces. Furthermore, Randal-Williams has led the way in developing homology stability arguments by adapting techniques for discrete groups to the infinite-dimensional diffeomorphism groups. In a different direction, Randal-Williams has found with Boris Botvinnik and Johannes Ebert a surprising application of his work to the space of metrics of positive scalar curvature on a spin manifold, showing that this space – of which very little was known previously – is topologically highly non-trivial.
Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
Carola Schönlieb works on the mathematical foundations of image analysis; her research is of fundamental mathematical significance as well as hugely relevant to the technology driving the current data revolution. Her major contributions include the development of a mathematical framework for data-driven models in imaging, numerical algorithms for the energy minimisation of large systems, and a ‘convexity splitting’ scheme for solving non-linear partial differential equations for image inpainting which results in an algorithm which is consistent, accurate and affordable. She has also linked computational applied analysis with statistics, particularly through her research on scalable methods for non-linear inverse problems in image analysis, sparse regularisation and optimisation. This has applications within cancer research and biomedical imaging, reconstruction of paintings and frescoes, fingerprint enhancement and simulation, and feature reconstruction from aerial photography. She has also demonstrated inspirational leadership, in particular as Director of the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information.
Professor Dominic Vella
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
Dominic Vella works in physical applied mathematics at the interface between soft matter/fluidics/solid and mathematical modelling. He is interested in understanding, modelling, and analysing important problems arising in physics, engineering and biology, as well as industrial problems. He has shown great skill in developing simple experiments and elegant models to gain insight into important phenomena and identify new mathematical principles. Vella’s innovative work includes an examination of instabilities in thin elastic sheets: he has developed a theory of delamination of thin films on elastic and liquid substrates, identified new features of wrinkling instabilities, and suggested new non-invasive methods to measure stress based on elastic instabilities during indentation (with applications to polymeric capsules and yeast cells). He has also contributed important mathematical insights to the hydrodynamics of floating objects (“the Cheerios effect”), the fluid mechanics of CO2 sequestration, and elasto-capillarity.
Dr Hendrik Weber
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Hendrik Weber’s research is in the area of stochastic analysis on the intersection of analysis, probability theory and mathematical physics. He is the strongest researcher of his generation in the hot topic of singular stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs), a class of equations that describe the behaviour of observables depending on several space and time variables subjected to random noise. He is at the forefront of current developments in our understanding of extremely irregular SPDEs and his insights, in collaboration with others, have made possible new thinking about both regularity structures and paracontrolled distributions. In collaboration with Jean-Christophe Mourrat, Weber has given the first proof of convergence of an interacting particle system to a two-dimensional renormalised SPDE, thereby resolving a 15-year-old conjecture. More recently, also with Mourrat, he has constructed global solutions to certain important equations from mathematical physics, introducing an exciting new set of mathematical tools into quantum field theory.
Philosophy and Theology
Dr Naomi Appleton
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
Naomi Appleton researches the religions of early India, in particular ancient Buddhist jataka: stories recounting past lives of the Buddha. Her three major monographs – Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism: Narrating the Bodhisatta Path (2010), Narrating Karma and Rebirth: Buddhist and Jain Multi-Life Stories (2014), and Shared Characters in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu Narrative (2017) – show how narrative characters, motifs and themes reveal the historical context of Hindu and Jain traditions as well as Buddhist, so illuminating early India‘s broader history, interrelations between its religious traditions, and the formation of religious ideas and communal identities. Together with Sarah Shaw, Dr Appleton has also published two volumes of translations of jataka: The Ten Great Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta (2015). Her next goal is to create an online database of jataka texts and to enable textual scholars and art historians to better understand the relationship between the texts and artistic representations of jataka at Buddhist sites.
Dr Joel Cabrita
Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge
Joel Cabrita is at the forefront of shaping world Christianities, an area of study crucial to understanding the role of Christian evangelisation in today’s globalised world. Her approach combines the methods of theology, history, and anthropology: she takes seriously the theological principles of the Christians she studies, while also placing them in the context of their community’s particular lived experience, by means of participant-observation fieldwork and extensive research in government and church historical archives; her subsequent articles have been published in leading peer-reviewed British and North American journals in religious studies, history and anthropology. Her current project focusses on evangelical institutions in South Africa and on the early twenthieth century origins of Christian distance-learning in North American Pentecostal and evangelical churches. Her research will document how evangelical Christianity, new media and transnational religious education is transforming higher education in southern Africa.
Dr John Michael
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick
John Michael is a philosopher of cognitive science, working at the boundary between philosophy and psychology. His approach combines subtle philosophical questioning with a mastery of experimental techniques and empirical research. He has already amassed a highly impressive body of published work and collaborated with leading figures in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. His research on social cognition and social interaction has led him to engage with many of the most important contemporary issues in cognitive science, including the role of mirror neurons in social cognition, the nature of empathy, and the conditions for joint action. Throughout this cluster of highly complex and technical questions, he succeeds in maintaining a unified outlook that gives a central role to simulation in social cognition and treats the role of embodiment in an original and at times sceptical manner – work that is transforming our understanding of action and the interpretation of other minds.
Professor Ian Phillips
Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham and Program in Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Ian Phillips is a philosopher committed to engaging traditional philosophy of mind with psychological science. Through informed philosophical reflection, he has repeatedly forced the field to rethink the alleged implications of empirical findings for questions concerning perception and consciousness. For example, it was once an orthodoxy in both psychology and the philosophy of mind that human beings consciously perceive far more than they can report or recall. Phillips re-examined the psychological data to argue that ‘postdiction’ effects offer an alternative explanation of standard results used to support this claim. Phillips has also argued against the orthodoxy that perception can occur outside awareness. He has also made significant contributions to the study of temporal experience. Again by means of philosophical reflection on the relevant data, he has presented original accounts of temporal distortions, the metaphysics of the stream of consciousness, attention to time and our capacities to perceive change.
Dr Bryan W Roberts
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science
Bryan Roberts’s primary research is in the philosophy of modern physics where he has made groundbreaking contributions, in particular on the nature of time symmetry in quantum mechanics and its violation in certain processes in particle physics. His thinking on the observability of time has also led him to propose a more general perspective on observables in quantum theories. In addition, he has made detailed explorations of the history of physics, carrying out innovative work on Galileo’s theory of free fall motion and Fermat’s justification of Galileo’s view. Dr Roberts’s work is characterised by exemplary conceptual clarity while also demonstrating the courage and capability to question entrenched positions and go beyond them. He analyses foundational philosophical problems with mathematical precision to arrive at results that are relevant for both science and philosophy and published to acclaim in journals specialising in physics, as well as philosophy of physics and philosophy of science.
Sociology and Social Policy
Dr David Clifford
Department of Social Statistics and Demography, University of Southampton
The UK voluntary sector now forms a crucial part of the welfare mix but lies outside the quantitative analysis routinely made of state provision. David Clifford’s work as a social statistician represents the cutting-edge of research efforts to transform this situation, in his pioneering use of ‘open’ administrative data held by the Charity Commission. His groundbreaking analyses have contributed significantly to the discipline of social policy. These contributions include: furthering our understanding of the nature of government-voluntary sector partnership (an analysis of patterns in charities’ public funding); clarifying thinking on the implications of ‘austerity’ for social wellbeing (an exploration of trends in charities’ income); vividly demonstrating the unevenness of voluntary sector activity (studies of spatial patterns in the distribution of voluntary organisations, and their underlying longitudinal dynamics). In addition; his work on overseas charities has helped to internationalise the study of social policy and bridge the divide between it and development studies.
Dr Des Fitzgerald
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Des Fitzgerald pursues an innovative vein of research that is opening up avenues for interdisciplinarity between the social and life sciences. His interests lie in the sociology of science and technology, in medical sociology, and, most recently, in urban sociology. His book, Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and the Affective Labour of Neuroscience (2017) is an account of the neurobiological search for one diagnosis and explores the ambiguous terrain of autism research across neuroscience and psychiatry. Working with international scholars across disciplines, he has contributed to lively debates on interdisciplinarity as documented in his co-authored book Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences (Callard, F. and Fitzgerald, D. 2015). His forthcoming research will extend these debates and begin to explore scope for engagements between our psyches and our physical environments. Can sociologists, environmentalists and life scientists collaborate to better understand the intertwining of physical environments and mental landscapes?
Dr Suzanne Hall
Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science
Suzanne Hall’s research into urban marginalisation – specifically, everyday living at the “migrant margins” of UK cities – has transformed understandings of the ordinary ways in which social differences are lived and experienced in diverse and unequal city spaces. Trained as an architect and as a sociologist, Dr Hall’s work stands out for its sophisticated visualisations of city streets as she explores “corner shop cosmopolitanism” and “urban conviviality”; she renders with skill and detail the cultural and economic lives of migrants to the global north – both in her monograph City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (2012) and in numerous articles. Her work is innovative in its focus on the formal layout of the street itself and its shops, as well as the social relations enacted therein. In her forthcoming work, she will apply her ethnographic sensibilities to studying female migrant retailers in Cape Town, South Africa.
Dr Alice Mah
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Alice Mah has worked on some of the most pressing global challenges of our time – the resilience or decline of communities in the face of “industrial ruination” and questions of environmental justice and politics arising from the toxic legacies of industrial pollution. Her most recent research focusses on “toxic expertise” in relation to the global petrochemical industry, involving heated debates about pollution, jobs, health, and the environment. As Dr Mah says in an editorial on the website that she co-founded, Toxic News, the aim is to help “to make people think more deeply and more globally about environmental justice in all of its complexity”. Dr Mah has collaborated internationally and published widely. In 2013 she received the BSA Philip Abram’s Memorial Prize for her first sole-authored book, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place, and her article ‘The Dereliction Tourist’ published in Sociological Research Online won the 2015 SAGE Prize for Innovation.
Dr Maria do Mar Pereira
Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Maria do Mar Pereira is a feminist sociologist working at the intersections of gender and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies. She uses ethnographic methods to produce theoretically ambitious and socially relevant research which advances academic knowledge but is also accessible to a wider audience. She has published widely in journals in different languages, and authored two books. Her first, Fazendo Género no Recreio: a Negociação do Género em Espaço Escolar (trans: Doing Gender in the Playground: the Negotiation of Gender in Schools) (2012), a prize-winning ethnography of young people's negotiations of gender and sexuality, is shaping national policy on gender and sex education in Portugal. The second, Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: an Ethnography of Academia (2017), is a groundbreaking longitudinal ethnography of academia, examining how academics decide what counts as ‘proper’ knowledge, and raising challenging questions about the present mood in universities across the world.
Dr Susana Carvalho
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford
Dr Manuel Fernandez-Gotz
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
Dr Oliver Harris
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester
Dr Camilla Speller
Department of Archaeology, University of York
Dr Fraser Sturt
Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton
Dr John Bower
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol
Dr Scott Cockroft
EaStCHEM School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh
Dr David Glowacki
School of Chemistry, University of Bristol
Dr Susan Perkin
Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford
Professor Aron Walsh
Department of Materials, Imperial College London
Dr Vasco Carvalho
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Dr Camille Landais
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Professor Kalina Manova
Department of Economics, University of Oxford
Professor Uta Schönberg
Department of Economics, University College London
Dr Fabian Waldinger
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Anna Barnett
Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex
Professor Cinzia Casiraghi
School of Chemistry, University of Manchester
Dr David Connolly
Institute for Infrastructure & Environment, Heriot-Watt University
Dr Alexandra Silva
Department of Computer Science, University College London
Dr Peter Vincent
Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London
Dr Katherine Brickell
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Vanesa Castán Broto
Development Planning Unit, The Bartlett, University College London
Dr Mark Graham
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Harriet Hawkins
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr David Thornalley
Department of Geography, University College London
Dr William Abberley
School of English, University of Sussex
Professor Alexandra Harris
Department of English, University of Liverpool
Dr Daisy Hay
Department of English, University of Exeter
Dr Lily Okalani Kahn
Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London
Dr Hannah Rohde
Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh
Dr Mirko Canevaro
University of Edinburgh
Institutional, social and economic history of ancient Athens and of the Greek poleis
Dr Esther Eidinow
University of Nottingham
Ancient Greek religion and magic
Dr Renaud Gagné
University of Cambridge
Ancient Greek literature and religion
Dr Naoise Mac Sweeney
University of Leicester
Cultural identity and interaction in Asia Minor
Dr Laura Swift
Open University
Greek literature
Dr John Rudge
University of Cambridge
Theoretical geophysics and geochemistry
Dr James Screen
University of Exeter
Climate variability and change in the polar regions and their global impacts
Dr Karin Sigloch
University of Oxford
Seismological imaging and the structure, dynamics and evolution of Earth’s interior
Dr Dominick Spracklen
University of Leeds
Interactions between the biosphere, the atmosphere and climate
Dr Nicholas Tosca
University of Oxford
Early co-evolution of Earth and life
Dr Jacopo Bertolotti
University of Exeter
Light multiple scattering and imaging in turbid media
Professor Jo Dunkley
University of Oxford
Cosmology
Professor Daniele Faccio
Heriot-Watt University
Science of light, from fundamental studies to novel imaging technologies
Dr Philip King
University of St Andrews
Electronic structure and emergent properties of quantum materials
Dr Suchitra Sebastian
University of Cambridge
Quantum condensed matter physics
Dr John Bew
King’s College London
History, foreign policy and statecraft
Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
University College London
Experiences of, and responses to, forced migration in/from the Middle East
Dr Dominik Hangartner
London School of Economics and Political Science
Political behaviour, political economy and comparative migration studies
Dr Laura Valentini
London School of Economics and Political Science
Political theory, domestic, international and methodological foundations
Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams
University of Warwick
International relations, border security, migration, security and the everyday
Dr Caroline Catmur
King’s College London
Psychological and neural mechanisms of social interaction
Dr Bhismadev Chakrabarti
University of Reading
Emotion, affective, neuroscience, empathy and autism
Dr Steve Loughnan
University of Edinburgh
Understanding and attributing mind, humanity and morality
Professor Liz Pellicano
Institute of Education, University of London
Autism science and developmental cognitive science
Professor Jonathan Roiser
University College London
Psychological and brain processes underlying mental health problems
Dr Sara Davidmann
University of the Arts London
Photography and visual arts with a focus on identity, family history and archives
Dr Mattias Frey
University of Kent
Film criticism; media historiography; institutional analysis; and German, Austrian and European cinema
Ms Hannah Rickards
University of the Arts London
Moving image, sound, installation, use of language in visual art, and musical composition
Dr Martin Suckling
University of York
Music composition and performance
Ms Corin Sworn
University of Oxford
Installation work that utilises photography, film with both sculpture and found objects
Classics
Dr Mirko Canevaro
Department of Classics, University of Edinburgh
Since the award of his PhD in 2012, Dr Mirko Canevaro has established his reputation as an ancient historian whose research manifests a rare combination of skills in ancient Greek law, society, literature, and thought. His 2013 monograph, The Documents in the Attic Orators, develops, for the first time, a sound methodology for establishing the authenticity of the legal documents that appear in the manuscripts of the Attic orators; his continuing work on the history of the legislative process at Athens is transforming the study of Athenian law. Still only 31, he has completed a second monograph (on one of the most important of Demosthenes’ political speeches), contributed to a major commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, and been elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland. The completion of his co-edited Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law will further demonstrate the emergence of a leading figure in the discipline.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/classics/staff-in-class...
Dr Esther Eidinow
Department of Classics, University of Nottingham
Dr Esther Eidinow is an original and powerful new voice in the field of ancient Greek history whose work combines close analysis of the textual and material evidence for Greek religion with far-reaching exploration of our theoretical models. Her published work has drawn on a range of influences to generate a host of new insights into ancient religious experience, not least (in her two monographs) the widespread use of divination and cursing in the Greek world. She is now at the forefront of efforts to learn from research in the cognitive science of religion, not least as founding editor of a new journal, the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Her forthcoming work on change in Greek religion looks set to cement her reputation as one of the leading scholars in the field internationally.
http://nottingham.ac.uk/classics/people/esther.eidinow
Dr Renaud Gagné
Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
Dr Renaud Gagné is one of the most original and creative minds in Classics today, someone who combines a highly sophisticated literary sensibility, a profound erudition, and a broad interdisciplinary openness. He has made fundamental contributions in a number of areas in the study of Greek literature and culture, working across tragedy, archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, as well as historiography. His most important work to date, Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece, is a landmark publication, not only as the richest treatment of a fundamental aspect of Greek thought, but as a model for future work, in particular in its integration of the study of the reception of ancestral fault. Dr Gagné’s forthcoming work – on the Hyperborea in the western cultural imagination, or on the chorus as metaphor – looks set to cement his already impressive reputation, and to continue to surprise.
http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/renaud-gagne
Dr Naoise Mac Sweeney
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester
In the eight years since completing her PhD at Cambridge, Naoise Mac Sweeney has published two monographs and an edited book, along with a clutch of important articles and chapters. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature spanning ancient history, archaeology and textual study, with a focus on issues of identity and ethnicity of the Eastern Greek cities. Her work is at the cutting edge of theoretical developments in the field, but equally founded on a sure handling of the varied source materials, linguistic and cultural. Building on from her monographs Community Identity and Archaeology and Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (and the edited book on Foundation myths in Ancient Societies), her next project will explore further issues of cultural diversity and cultural activity in Archaic Ionia. The ‘Ionian enlightenment’ is widely acknowledged to have significantly influenced subsequent developments of Classical Greek culture more widely. Her work seeks to re-examine the wider cultural context of these innovations and to offer a fresh approach to the relationship between cultural diversity and cultural creativity.
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/people/mac_sweeney
Dr Laura Swift
Department of Classical Studies, Open University
Dr Laura Swift’s work on ancient Greek lyric and tragic poetry has established her as one of the leading Hellenists of her generation. Her acclaimed and prize-winning 2010 monograph, The Hidden Chorus, breaks new ground in offering the first systematic, book-length study of the ways in which Greek tragedy appropriates and exploits other genres of choral song. In demonstrating the extent to which genres interact in fifth-century tragedy, Dr Swift also displays her mastery of the distinct branches of scholarship on which her synthesis rests. She has since gone on to apply that expertise with outstanding effect in a large number of further publications on archaic poetry and tragedy, and especially on the fragments of Archilochus, the subject of a major commentary to appear with Oxford University Press in 2016.
http://www.open.ac.uk/people/ls9939
Earth Sciences
Dr John Rudge
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Rigorous theoretical models of mantle dynamics are required to understand the evolution of the Earth and John Rudge is conducting pioneering research in this field. John employs his expertise in continuum mechanics, mantle dynamics, stochastic processes and isotope geochemistry to develop mathematical models of mantle geochemical heterogeneity and mixing. By representing the solid and liquid melts in the mantle as a two-phase flow, and the melt mixing as a stochastic process, John develops models of the mantle dynamics, which shed light on the pathways of magma from deep inside the Earth’s interior, near the core-mantle boundary, to the surface. These models are validated from geochemical data derived from ocean island basalts. Specifically the heterogeneities in these basalts, and other lava samples, originate from deep within the mantle, while others are related to shallower melting processes, all of which are potentially simulated in these two-phase mantle dynamics models.
http://www.johnrudge.com/
Dr James Screen
College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter
Rapid Arctic climate change is impacting not only the Arctic regions but, as Dr James Screen has shown in a number of high-profile publications, the mid-latitudes and the large-scale atmospheric circulation system. He provided the first observational evidence that loss of sea-ice is already leading to increased warming in the Arctic and that decreased snow-fall onto ice leads to increased ice-melting and thus further loss of ice in the Arctic regions. Understanding links between climate change and weather extremes is of great importance and James has already made significant contributions to climate science in the six years since he was awarded his PhD. James is leading and defining this globally important field by revealing causal links and mechanisms in the climate system. At the same time, he is impacting the wider fields of global change including policy and public perceptions through high profile, accessible research outputs and prime-time TV interviews. This award will allow him to grow his highly productive research group and extend his innovative global collaborations.
http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/mathematics/staff/js546
Dr Karin Sigloch
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Karin Sigloch is a leading early career geophysicist who studies the structure of the interior of the Earth. She uses seismological techniques to address unsolved geodynamical questions that are relevant across the whole of earth sciences. Her research is already having an enormous impact on the understanding of Pacific plate history and on the tectonic evolution of the North American continent. Her proposal of a new subduction history involving extra oceans in the Jurassic and Cretaceous to explain deep anomalies in the lower mantle has completely overturned the very long-established large-scale geological view of the assembly of western North America. The European Research Council has awarded her a Starting Grant to use seismic tomography to image subducted tectonic plates in the mantle down to the core, and produce a 3-D atlas of the mantle that matches subducted oceanic plates with palaeo-oceans as inferred from surface geology.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/academic/karins
Dr Dominick Spracklen
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds
In the ten years since receiving his PhD, Dominick Spracklen has developed a significant, sustained, novel and broad contribution, bridging the gap between fine-scale atmospheric chemistry, climate modelling and innovative field, and remote, observations. He has strong international collaborative networks and a demonstrable influence on UK government policy. Spracklen’s work on organic aerosols has shown that a large proportion of this important class of pollutant is anthropogenic in origin and that one half of cloud condensation nuclei derive from fires and fossil fuel combustion. He has used novel satellite observations to demonstrate, for the first time at the pan-tropical scale, enhanced rainfall downwind of forests, reconciling a long-standing discrepancy between models and observations. His remarkably wide range of activities, along with his ability to speak the languages of diverse research communities, demonstrates a very mature approach and clear leadership in the field.
http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~eardvs/
Dr Nicholas Tosca
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Nick Tosca is a geologist working at the interface of sedimentology, geochemistry and geobiology. He uses the chemistry and mineralogy of ancient rocks to reconstruct past environments and so evaluate their potential to sustain life. His research is as applicable to life on other planets as it is to life on Earth. Consequently he has played a part in the exploration of Mars, including some highly influential contributions to the selection of the landing site for the Mars Exploration Rover in 2012. He has emphasised repeatedly that the presence, on Mars and elsewhere, of water alone is not a sufficient criterion for the existence of life. In his research he has developed a mastery of field geology, mineralogy, thermodynamics, spectroscopy and laboratory experiments. He is one of a new breed of earth scientists who are using a broad portfolio of multidisciplinary techniques to tackle some of the most important problems in the subject.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/academic/nickt
Physics
Dr Jacopo Bertolotti
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Exeter
Jacopo Bertolotti is a leading optical physicist who uses light scattering to both answer questions in fundamental physics and develop new imaging systems. When light scatters within a material it explores different regions but just like honeybees explore the garden, a mix of short and long flights proves to be the optimum strategy. Understanding the statistics by which light scatters can be applied to imaging systems too. It transpires that having measured the scattering of light on a single path, one also learns about the scattering in similar directions too; the optical memory effect. Jacopo is using this memory effect to pioneer new techniques that combine conventional imaging of the highly-scattered light with advanced computational techniques to recover high-quality images not observable by the naked eye.
http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/physics-astronomy/staff/jb601
Professor Daniele Faccio
School of Engineering and Physical Sciences; Heriot Watt University
Daniele Faccio is a leading optical physicist with interests that span optical demonstrations of fundamental phenomena to practical devices addressing application needs. His work using ultra-intense laser pulses propagating within non-linear media demonstrated the laboratory analogue of Hawking radiation where the moving pulse forms the effective event horizon and the generated light the Hawking emissions. He is also exploring the latest technologies for time-resolved imaging which when combined with single-photon sensitivity create the opportunity to detect objects from around corners or look straight-through highly-scattering objects. This range of interests and skills mean that Daniele is central to QuantIC, one of the UK’s Quantum Technology hubs and its mission to pioneer new Imaging Cameras.
http://extremelight.eps.hw.ac.uk/
Professor Jo Dunkley
Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Jo Dunkley has played a major role in the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation, most notably through the analysis of data gathered by the WMAP and Planck satellites, and by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). She made one of the first significant findings of weak lensing of the cosmic background radiation and of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and her group played a leading role in the cosmological parameter estimations that were extracted from these data sets. She has led the comparison studies of the ACT and Planck data and has developed fast algorithms and statistical techniques for dealing with large cosmological data sets. Her keen astrophysical insight has helped us to understand sources of bias and noise introduced into the cosmic background radiation signal by other astrophysical sources. Her leading role has been recognised nationally by the award of the 2013 Maxwell Medal of the IOP and the 2014 Fowler Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society and internationally by a share in the 2012 Gruber Prize for Cosmology with other members of the WMAP team.
http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~Dunkley/
Dr Philip King
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews
Philip King is one of the leading practitioners of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), a technique based on the photoelectric effect that can be used to study the electronic structure of surfaces. His experiments using ARPES have revealed the presence of a two-dimensional electron gas at the surfaces of oxides and also coexisting with the surfaces states of topological insulators. He has also discovered unexpectedly large spin splittings in a material possessing inversion symmetry, a property previously understood to prevent strongly spin-polarised bulk electronic states. This has many potential implications for the development of spin-based electronic (spintronic) applications. His work has demonstrated the power of ARPES in illuminating numerous important aspects of the physics of quantum materials.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/physics/condmat/arpes/
Dr Suchitra Sebastian
Department of Physics, University of Cambridge
Suchitra Sebastian has combined pioneering material synthesis, low-temperature techniques, high magnetic fields and high pressures to investigate important properties of quantum matter. She has found innovative methods to investigate the relationship between superconductivity and magnetism and to study the electronic structure of new superconducting materials. Her ground breaking experimental work involves the measurement of quantum oscillations that allow her to infer the nature of the Fermi surface in the normal state of exotic superconductors. Her research has opened the way towards a systematic understanding of the nature of high temperature superconductivity.
http://www.qm.phy.cam.ac.uk/sebastian/
Politics and International Relations
Dr John Bew
Department of War Studies, King’s College London
Dr John Bew’s pioneering publications show him to be working at the cutting edge of three disciplines, History, Foreign Policy Analysis and International Politics. He interrogates the archive with an exacting but imaginative eye. The result has been three path-breaking works. These skills have been applied to both the history and politics of Britain but also global statecraft. The results have shed new light on well researched subjects, forcing the academic reader to think again, questioning long-held truisms, opening up new approaches to research and sparking innovative intellectual debates.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/readers/bew.aspx
Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
Department of Geography, University College London
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is an outstanding scholar who has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the conditions, consequences and processes of forced migration and displacement. Grounded in a profound and critical engagement with the field of ‘refugee studies’ and its epistemological underpinnings, her work is informed by extensive and very thorough fieldwork, most notably amongst Sahrawi refugee populations, but also elsewhere. This has allowed her to take further her trenchant analysis of the politics and framing of humanitarianism, demonstrating an acute sense of the power implicated in its construction. In addition, it has led into her current work on refugees’ experiences of the ways in which their predicament has been handled by a variety of initiatives, some faith-based, originating in the global South and affecting the lives of displaced peoples across the Middle East and North Africa. The insights derived from this work look set to inform a radically different way of understanding humanitarian theory and practice, with important implications for policy, as well as for the field of study.
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/academic-staff/ele...
Dr Dominik Hangartner
Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dominik Hangartner has established himself as a leading scholar in research methods and political science. He has published influential contributions on the effects of voting systems on representation and policy as well as immigration and naturalisation. His work on immigration and naturalization demonstrates the important role of institutions in shaping naturalization decisions as well as the substantial effects of receiving citizenship on social and political integration of immigrants. His research has attracted international attention, and the important implications for naturalisation policies are reflected in his active links to public agencies and charities. His work is characterised by a strong attention to the role of research design and exploiting exogenous sources of variation for improving causal inference as well as the development of new statistical methodologies to address particular research challenges. He will use the Leverhulme funds for future research on asylum policy as well as a book summarizing his research on the causes and consequences of citizenship.
http://www.hangartner.net/
Dr Laura Valentini
Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Laura Valentini has made an important and wide-ranging contribution to contemporary political theory. In particular, in her book Justice in A Globalized World: A Normative Framework, as well in a series of influential articles, she has developed an account of global justice that steers a course between, on the one hand, a cosmopolitan approach that strongly emphasises global duties of justice, and, a statist view that puts the emphasis on duties to fellow citizens. As well as her analysis of global justice, Dr Valentini has produced illuminating analyses of the concept of human rights and of democratic theory. In addition to this, she has made significant contributions to the ongoing debates about the methodology of political theory. Her work has explored the relationship between practices and principles of justice, and shed light on the relationship between ideal theory, on the one hand, and non ideal theory, on the other.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/government/whosWho/Academic%20profiles/lmvalentini@...
Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Nick Vaughan-Williams is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick. Over the past decade he has produced agenda-setting work on the subject of borders, which successfully blends high quality empirical work with a sophisticated understanding of theory. Writing from an International Relations perspective, but sensitive to the inter-disciplinary nature of his subject, he forces us to reconsider the nature and political purpose of borders in the twenty-first century. His work challenges what it is to be secure, the contemporary meaning of sovereignty, what constitutes political identity and the very nature of politics at the international level.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/vaughan-williams
Psychology
Dr Caroline Catmur
Department of Psychology, King’s College London
Caroline Catmur is an experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who has done ground breaking work on the mechanisms underlying social interaction, in particular imitation and perspective-taking. After undergraduate study at the University of Oxford, and a PhD at University College London, she was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey before moving recently to King’s College London. Her research showing that mirror neurons acquire their properties through sensorimotor learning is internationally renowned for its rigour, and the innovative way it combines behavioural methods with functional imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation. In other strikingly original studies, her work has revealed the time course of mirror responses; shown that social cognition can be enhanced by transcranial direct current stimulation; and elucidated the role of the temporoparietal junction in social cognition. Her previous awards include a Future Research Leader grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, and both the University of Surrey’s Researcher of the Year award, and the University of Surrey’s Students’ Union award for Academic of the Year.
https://sites.google.com/site/carolinecatmur/
Dr Bhismadev Chakrabarti
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading
Dr Chakrabarti is a leading researcher in social neuroscience, whose pioneering studies have examined the neural basis of social rewards, particularly smiles from other people. His work has encompassed psychological, physiological (EMG, EEG and fMRI) and genetic methodologies, integrating findings across these levels of explanation to build a comprehensive understanding of some of the important mechanisms regulating complex social behaviour. For example, he has shown that specific variations in the cannabinoid receptor gene modulate the response of reward-related circuits in the ventral striatum, and that these striatal responses are associated with changes in gaze duration when looking at smiling faces. His current work is extending this approach to examine other kinds of social rewards, such as verbal praise and tactile gestures, and will advance our understanding of ordinary social behaviour and also psychiatric conditions in which social behaviour is impaired.
http://www.bhismalab.org/
Dr Steve Loughnan
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Central topics of Steve Loughnan’s research programme are the antecedents and consequences of seeing others as less than fully human. His research shows that whether or not other groups, individuals, or species are seen as having minds leads perceivers to treat them very differently. One important strand of his research is concerned with dehumanisation – the tendency to attribute lesser mental capacities to members of certain social groups. His work on this topic has been highly innovative. He has pioneered the use of implicit methods and measures to study subtle forms of dehumanisation, showing that social groups can be tacitly viewed as non-human. This locates dehumanisation on a continuum ranging from this implicit tendency to the more extreme forms of dehumanisation seen in genocide. In other research he has focused on the objectification of individuals, where he has shown that the tendency to dehumanise others provides a way of re-conceptualizing objectification, and that sexual objectification has important consequences for the ways in which victims of rape and domestic violence are regarded. In recent work he has extended this general line of thinking to the topic of animals and meat-eating, showing that eating animals changes our view of them and that how we view animals changes our desire to eat them. His work is characterised by its theoretical sophistication, its methodological versatility (ranging from eye-tracking and implicit methods to surveys and cross-cultural research), its ability to span different levels of analysis (ranging from individuals to groups to large-scale social institutions), and its relevance to societal issues.
http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/people/steve-loughnan
Professor Liz Pellicano
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education, University of London
Professor Liz Pellicano is an internationally renowned developmental cognitive scientist who is distinguished for her work on autism, both for its theoretical and practical significance. Her research has demonstrated atypicalities in flexible perceptual processing and prediction experienced in autistic people leading to new insights into the nature and effects of the condition. Professor Pellicano’s work displays formidable skill and insight into the distinctive opportunities and challenges often faced by autistic children, young people and adults. Results of her studies can be translated directly into meaningful changes in educational and clinical practice. She is Director of the Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE) at UCL- Institute of Education.
http://crae.ioe.ac.uk/post/125932215928/professor-liz-pellicano
Professor Jonathan Roiser
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
Professor Jon Roiser is faculty member of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and his research career has been both influential and novel. His research uses models and theories from neuroscience to understand the psychological and brain mechanisms that are associated with the symptoms of mental illness. He addresses these issues with an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, and methods from cognitive psychology, computational modelling, pharmacology, phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience. He has an outstanding record of publishing high quality papers, and has been very successful in attracting research funding. Jon Roiser has been at the forefront of a movement that aims to tackle diagnostic labels used in mental health by reframing symptoms within psychological and brain mechanisms, and his research thus offers the potential to move beyond descriptive accounts of mental health issues into more mechanistic accounts. This approach holds great promise for the development of new therapies.
https://sites.google.com/site/roiserlab/
Visual and Performing Arts
Dr Sara Davidmann
School of Media, University of the Arts London
Dr Sara Davidmann is an artist whose practice with photography is in the fields of human relations and identity. Her substantial research to date with specific focus on gender and transgender identity has established an international marker and reputation. There is much promise in her forthcoming and differing arc of development that considers absence and loss in the brutality of kinder transport, holocaust survival and forced migration of the Second World War. Her perspective is from the very personal histories involved to the broader recognised archives of more collective memory. This will extend and widen further her already extensive study field in both research and outcome.
http://saradavidmann.com/
Dr Mattias Frey
School of Arts, University of Kent
Mattias Frey has established himself as a scholar to watch with a series of substantial publications on a range of important areas within the study of film. These include works on ‘postwall’ German cinema, and the nature and role of film criticism; another forthcoming on ‘extreme cinema’ (conceived as one strand of contemporary art cinema), as well as a co-authored work on audio history. Alongside these monograph projects, Dr Frey has co-edited two collections, on film criticism in the digital age and on the ethics of cinema, as well as essays on a wide range of topics, including Béla Balázs, Michael Haneke, and W.G. Sebald. These diverse interests feed into his current project on the role(s) of the historical film in art and society. In addition, Dr Frey acts as a Director for the Centre for Film and Media Research at the University of Kent, as well as an editor of the journal Film Studies. On the basis of these achievements, Dr Frey was invited as Visiting Professor of Art and New Media at the University of Bremen, and guest researcher at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/staff-profiles/profiles/film/frey.html
Ms Hannah Rickards
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts
Hannah Rickards is an artist who since her 2005 work Thunder has made an impressive and consistent body of work that interrogates meaning through the use of installed media and sound. Her research specific projects are meticulous and always marked by their absolute attention to detail in presenting fugitive and temporal sites for sensory experience. As her practice has grown so too has its exposure and reputation both nationally and internationally.
Working widely as she has in an eclectic framework of public institutions, enabling possibilities for her experimental works, she has developed an extensive and considerable practice as good foundation for great potential.
http://www.arts.ac.uk/csm/people/teaching-staff/fine-art/hannah-rickards/
Dr Martin Suckling
Department of Music, University of York
Dr Martin Suckling is a distinguished composer who has been commissioned by leading international orchestras, ensembles and soloists over the past decade. His music is published by Faber Music Ltd and he has been Associate Composer of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra since 2013. He has a growing reputation internationally as a distinctive voice in British music. His current research and interest in the use of microtonality infuses his compositions. In the next few years he will complete three substantial pieces for orchestra, music for solo violin and electronics, and a digital opera mini-series.
http://www.martinsuckling.com/
Ms Corin Sworn
The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
Glasgow-based, Canadian artist Corin Sworn has already gained significant recognition for her installation work that utilises photography and film with both sculpture and found objects. In 2011, Sworn’s Endless Renovation (2010) was exhibited as a solo presentation as part of the ArtNow series at Tate Britain. The installation included an archive of one-hundred-and sixty 35mm slides alongside a series of antique vases displaying historically specific flower arrangements. Her commission for the Scotland + 55th Venice Biennale, a film work, The Rag Papers in 2013, led to her subsequent nomination for the Max Mara Award for Women Artists. In January 2014, Sworn was announced as the winner of the Max Mara Award. Sworn’s immersive and engaging installations develop the ongoing re-investigation of narrative structures within contemporary multi-media practice. Sworn’s practice includes sculptural works in a diverse range of materials including silk, ceramic and wood. Recent exhibitions include Storytelling at the National Gallery of Canada (2013), Vibrant Matter at the Langen Foundation, Dusseldorf (2014) and *Untitled at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015).
http://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/people/corin-sworn
Professor Michael Brockhurst
University of York
Evolutionary biology and experimental evolution
Dr Elizabeth Murchison
University of Cambridge
Cancer genetics
Professor Ewa Paluch
University College London
Cell biophysics
Dr Thomas Richards
University of Exeter
Evolutionary genomics of eukaryotic cellular complexity and microbial diversity
Dr Nikolay Zenkin
Newcastle University
Biochemistry and molecular biology of gene expression
Professor Manuel Barcia Paz
University of Leeds
Atlantic slavery and slave trade history; Brazil and Cuba (nineteenth century)
Dr Aaron Moore
University of Manchester
Comparative history of East Asia
Dr Renaud Morieux
University of Cambridge
Anglo-French relations in the eighteenth century in Europe and empires
Dr Hannah Skoda
University of Oxford
Medieval socio-cultural history, particularly violence and reactions to change
Dr David Trippett
University of Bristol
Music history, nineteenth century intellectual history, aesthetics and media theory
Dr Alexandros Beskos
University College London
Computational statistics and Monte-Carlo methods
Dr Daniel Kral
University of Warwick
Graph theory, extremal combinatorics and theoretical computer science
Dr David Loeffler
University of Warwick
and
Dr Sarah Zerbes
University College London
Number theory
Professor Richard Samworth
University of Cambridge
Nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics
Dr Corinna Ulcigrai
University of Bristol
Dynamical systems and ergodic theory
Dr Jonathan Birch
London School of Economics and Political Science
Philosophy of the biological and behavioural sciences
Dr Tim Button
University of Cambridge
Metaphysics, philosophies of logic, language, and mathematics
Professor Ofra Magidor
University of Oxford
Philosophy of logic and language, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mathematics
Dr Anna Mahtani
London School of Economics and Political Science
Philosophy of probability and philosophy of logic and language
Dr Holger Michael Zellentin
University of Nottingham
Qur’anic studies and Jewish studies
Professor Alan Bogg
University of Oxford
International, European and Comparative Labour Law
Dr Prabha Kotiswaran
King’s College London
Feminist legal theory, criminal law, rape, trafficking, sex work, sexual violence, and the sociology of law
Dr Sarah Nouwen
University of Cambridge
International criminal law, the intersections of law and politics and peace processes
Professor Erika Rackley
University of Birmingham
Gender and diversity in the judiciary and legal profession
Dr Michael Waibel
University of Cambridge
International (economic) law, international dispute settlement, law and economics
Dr Lucie Cluver
University of Oxford
Preventing HIV-infection and reducing social disadvantage for AIDS affected children
Dr Hazem Kandil
University of Cambridge
Revolution and war in the modern Middle East, France and the US
Dr Victoria Redclift
University of Surrey
The sociology of migration and political exclusion
Dr Katherine Smith
University of Edinburgh
Public health and inequalities
Dr Imogen Tyler
University of Lancaster
The sociology of inequality; social and cultural theory
Biological Sciences
Professor Michael Brockhurst
Department of Biology, University of York
Michael Brockhurst is one of the leading evolutionary ecologists of his generation. He carries out world-leading research at the interface of evolutionary biology and medical microbiology. He has exploited whole genome data and experimental evolution techniques to make major advances in our understanding of the coevolution of species interactions, providing the first direct experimental evidence at the molecular level for the Red Queen hypothesis. He has also carried out pioneering work on sociality in bacterial populations, and on the evolutionary dynamics of bacterial infections. Working with NHS clinicians, he has applied evolutionary thinking to show that rapid bacterial evolution has important consequences for the development of novel antimicrobials, and for the prognosis and treatment of chronic bacterial infections such as cystic fibrosis. In addition to his core scientific work, which is supported by a range of highly competitive grants, his public engagement work has led to collaborative work with artists and technologists funded by the Arts Council and the Wellcome Trust.
http://www.york.ac.uk/biology/research/ecology-evolution/michael-brockhu...
Dr Elizabeth Murchison
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge
Cancers are a class of disease caused by cells that multiply out of control inside our bodies. They are one of the leading causes of mortality, especially in aging populations. Up until recently it was assumed that cancers die together with the individuals they have made ill. But that consensus has now been overturned by Elizabeth Murchison who studies a rare form of cancer that can be transmitted from one individual to another like an infectious disease. So far this infectious cancer has only been observed in dogs and in the Tasmanian Devil, a small marsupial mammal that lives in Tasmania. Tasmanian devils spread the cancer by biting each other, and in dogs it is spread by sexual activity, making their cancer a venereal disease. Remarkably, Murchison has been able to show that each of these cancers arose just once in a single individual, and have continued to survive as cancerous cells get transmitted to others. In the case of dogs, Murchison has shown that the founding individual lived around 11,000 years ago. Murchison’s work raises questions of profound importance to the field of cancer studies. How, for example, do these infectious cancer cells escape detection by the new host’s immune systems? And, if these infectious cancers can exist in dogs and Tasmanian devils, do they also exist – as yet undetected – in other mammals, including humans?
http://www.vet.cam.ac.uk/directory/murchison
Professor Ewa Paluch
MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London
Ewa Paluch is one of the leading exponents of research at the interface of physics and biology, applying biophysical techniques and quantitative imaging to address fundamental questions in cell biology. Dr Paluch has carried out pioneering research into the biophysical mechanisms regulating cell shape, cell division and cell movement. Her research focuses on the role of the actin cortex, which enables the cell to exert mechanical force and resist external stresses. Dr Paluch has made a major contribution to life science and is a world leader in her field.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lmcb/research-group/ewa-paluch-research-group
Professor Thomas Richards
College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter
Tom Richards investigates the relationship between genome evolution, cellular organisation and microbial ecology. He has pioneered the use of whole genome data to understand the evolution of cellular traits and the likely characteristics of the last universal common ancestor to eukaryotic organisms. In a very short period of time, he has developed a world-leading reputation in understanding the role that horizontal gene transfer has played in the evolution of pathogenic lineages in very diverse groups of micro-organisms. His work provides completely new insight into the evolutionary diversity of microbial eukaryotes and is re-defining the tree of life. Professor Richards’s exceptional publications and recent discoveries demonstrate that he is a true leader in the field of evolutionary genomics.
http://biosciences.exeter.ac.uk/staff/index.php?web_id=tom_richards
Dr Nikolay Zenkin
Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences, Newcastle University
Professor Zenkin is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his distinguished and groundbreaking research into the mechanisms controlling information flow from DNA into RNA at the level of the molecular enzymology of the complex multi-subunit RNA polymerase. Zenkin’s work is characterised by his penetrating use of biochemistry and genetics to discover mechanisms controlling RNA polymerase functionality, with wide ranging implications for all genetic systems. Currently at Newcastle University, Zenkin has studied at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and at the Waksman Institute, Rutgers University in the USA.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/camb/staff/profile/nikolay.zenkin
History
Dr Manuel Barcia Paz
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds
Manuel Barcia Paz has made pioneering contributions to the history of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century in three monographs distinguished by their originality of argument, and by the ingenious work with difficult archives in three widely-separated locations (Cuba, Spain, and Brazil) and two languages which underpin them. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Slave Resistance on Cuban Plantations (2008) uses colonial records to open to us the inner world of slave society with an extraordinary subtlety. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 (2012) is the first major study of what was an important early nineteenth-century slave rebellion. One of its key insights, made possibly by Barcia Paz’s discovery of sources which indicated the African ethnic groups from which rebels came, was that Africans who had significant military experience in Africa were central to the revolt. This led to his third book, the West African Warfare in Cuba and Brazil (2014), a powerful ‘connective history’ which shows the interlinked character of war in Africa and slave rebellions in two otherwise disconnected theatres of New World slavery. In his latest work, he examines the linked histories of sports and politics in twentieth-century Cuba and the United States. Barcia Paz combines the careful gaze of the microhistorian on individual actors with a capacity to see the larger regional and global connections which bridge Cuba and Brazil to Latin America, to West Africa, and North America.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/125056/156/manuel_barcia_paz
Dr Aaron Moore
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
Dr Aaron Moore is an historian with a special interest in East Asia. Having received his PhD in 2006 from Princeton, he held temporary appointments at Harvard University, the University of Virginia and the University of Oxford and since 2010 he has been a lecturer at Manchester. His principal publication to date is a monograph (Harvard UP, 2013) which examines the lived experience of Japanese soldiers at war through their diaries, comparing their responses to training, propaganda and battlefield experience with that of their American counterparts. He has also published numerous shorter pieces and peer-reviewed articles. The panel was impressed by the ambition of his work, its comparative and transnational scope, and also by his skilful use of difficult sources in a number of Asian languages. Developing his interest in the subjective and the personal, Dr Moore intends to use diaries to explore the mentalities of Chinese communists as they, too, evolved from ordinary citizens into ‘good’ Maoists. He is also eager to follow the development of futuristic and utopian thought in a comparative context in Russia, China, Turkey and Japan, primarily through the prism of popular media and science fiction. To this end, he hopes to use some of his prize money to learn Turkish.
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/aaron.moore
Dr Renaud Morieux
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Renaud Morieux was educated in France (at the École Normale Supérieure) and England and has taught in France and, now, at Cambridge. He has written a remarkable book (soon to be translated into English) on the English Channel/La Manche as a zone of encounter between the French and the English during the long eighteenth century – the book covers geography, cartography, fortifications, maritime law, smuggling, commerce, travel and much else; he has a further equally remarkable book on French and English prisoners of war forthcoming. He is that rare thing, a genuinely comparative historian, equally at home in the archives of two nations, and able to throw illumination on the history of both by bringing out unexpected similarities and differences. He will now be writing a book on international customary law in the eighteenth century, and will be extending his enquiries to archives in India and North America.
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/rm656@cam.ac.uk
Dr Hannah Skoda
Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Hannah Skoda, who has been Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College Oxford since 2010, has made highly original contributions to the study of violence in late medieval Europe. In her prize-winning book, Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330, she developed pioneering methods of analysis, focusing her attention on the disempowered. Using the insights of anthropology and of literary scholarship, she has uncovered the ways in which violence was used to negotiate social relations. Her interest has extended to student riots and domestic violence as well as political protest. Her next project concerns nostalgia in fourteenth-century Europe, embracing both pastoral idylls and chivalric ideals.
http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/skoda.html
Dr David Trippett
Department of Music, University of Bristol
David Trippett has already gained international recognition for his highly innovative approach to the history of nineteenth-century music. His prize-winning study of Wagner’s melodies confronts some of the basic issues of musical aesthetics, while at the same time setting them securely within the cultural context of their times. Not only does he examine the different ways in which Wagner’s contemporaries wrote about the effects of melody; he also shows how their views engage with some of the fundamental scientific questions of the day, and specifically those that relate to the bodily senses and the human capacity for speech. This is indeed path-breaking research. Dr Trippett lays out a new agenda for the writing of musical history, in which he himself seems well placed to assume a leading role.
http://www.davidtrippett.com/
Law
Professor Alan Bogg
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Alan Bogg is one of the foremost academic labour lawyers of his generation, producing work that is legally rigorous, whilst also being theoretically informed and transnational in scope. His reconceptualisation of collective bargaining law is recognised as amongst the most significant works in labour law published in the common law world in recent times. Using concepts in liberal political philosophy, he has tracked changing legal strategies and public policies in workers’ rights in recent years, and argues for an understanding of collective labour relations grounded in a civic republican politics. His work also demonstrates how analysis of national legal approaches can be enriched by deep comparative awareness. His defence of a conception of freedom of association that encompasses a fundamental right to collective bargaining, for example, engages work on recent Canadian approaches to freedom of association. More recent work on the legal and theoretical dimensions of ‘voices at work’ is a uniquely systematic study comparing Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In focusing on the collective dimensions of work relations, Alan Bogg’s original and creative work could hardly be more important, at a time when the regulation of the labour market has come into renewed prominence as a central political issue in this age of austerity.
http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/profile/bogga
Dr Prabha Kotiswaran
Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Prabha Kotiswaran has an outstanding record of achievement in interdisciplinary research on gender and law. A scholar whose work has truly international reach, as well as broad implications for socio-legal theory, she has established a world-wide reputation for her studies of human trafficking and sex work. Her 2011 monograph, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, which won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics, demonstrated the adverse consequences on sex workers of the increased criminalisation of prostitution and argued for a reframing of sex work in terms of labour instead. She will use her Leverhulme Prize to extend this research in three related directions: a monograph subjecting the law’s treatment of women’s labour in sex work, dancing, surrogacy and domestic work to critical examination; an edited volume evaluating the criminal justice approach of international law on human trafficking; and two books developing her collaborative work on ‘governance feminism’, assessing feminists’ success in governance projects, particularly criminal law reform. The extension work will likely have considerable political and social significance.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/law/people/academic/pkotiswaran.aspx
Dr Sarah Nouwen
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge
Since receiving her doctorate in 2010, Sarah Nouwen’s courageous and ground breaking research into the impact of the International Criminal Court in conflict situations has established her as a leading scholar of international law. Her outstanding work combines innovative empirical insights with theoretical sophistication and legal analysis. She skilfully and effectively tests the claimed ideals of international criminal law against practice, revealing the realities of legal interventions in highly complex and sensitive environments, including conflict zones. Dr Nouwen’s extensive fieldwork has so far been completed with the assistance of a string of small grants and awards. The award of the Leverhulme prize will enable her to pursue important empirical work into peace negotiations in international law.
http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/people/sarah-nouwen
Professor Erika Rackley
Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
Professor Rackley is a brilliant feminist scholar who has held two chairs even though she is only 38. It is almost ten action-packed years since she attained her doctorate but there are no signs of her slowing down – she will shortly be taking up a highly competitive British Academy mid-career fellowship. As this suggests, the candidate has clearly demonstrated significant past achievements with an international impact. Her recent monograph on Women, Judging and the Judiciary was awarded the 2013 Peter Birks prize – probably the most prestigious book prize for legal academics in the UK and Ireland. She was a co-investigator in the seminal ESRC Feminist Judgments project which has had a major international impact and is now being copied in other parts of the world. Professor Rackley has also been highly influential in the judicial diversity debate in the past few years in England and Wales. Engaged and relevant, the law panel had few concerns about her future promise, considering her project proposal to have the potential to be ground-breaking in academic and policy terms, as well as challenging and ambitious.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/law/staff/profile.aspx?ReferenceId=8...
Dr Michael Waibel
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge
Michael Waibel has an outstanding portfolio of research on legal aspects of sovereign debts and defaults including a prize-winning monograph which has been highly influential in the field. His scholarship has had a major impact on perceptions of the legal framework for sovereign debt and of the viability of recourse to international fora for the settlement of sovereign debt disputes arising from emerging markets to the Eurozone. Dr Waibel’s highly original work also explores potential parallels between insolvent countries and insolvent companies, analogies between standard form contracts in domestic law and model treaties, and the impact on the development of international law. He brings to his scholarship a deep understanding of the political and economic factors that shape the development of international law and the international economic system, which he combines with strong historical and comparative perspectives.
http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/people/michael-waibel
Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Alexandros Beskos
Department of Statistical Science, University College London
Dr Alexandros Beskos is a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at University College London and one of the most promising statisticians of his generation. He works in computational statistics and is particularly interested in the theory and applications of Monte-Carlo methods. Many of his projects are linked to overcoming the ‘curse of dimensionality’, namely that the established methods in statistics often become ineffective in high or infinite dimensions. His work is not only highly influential in statistics, but also in applied probability and applied mathematics more generally. He is a leading expert for sampling in high-dimensional spaces and, in collaboration with Roberts, he developed the first known exact algorithm for the sampling of diffusions. This work constitutes a major breakthrough in Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and opened the path to exact inference for diffusions. He has also made important contributions to sequential Monte Carlo methods, showing that advanced design can lead to stable methods even in very high dimensions. This is a hot topic with important applications, for example in geophysics and fluid dynamics. More recently he started a collaboration applying modern methods of computational statistics to complex biostatistics models. He is a founding member of the Applied Probability Section of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and has served the section in a variety of roles.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/people/alexandrosbeskos
Dr Daniel Kral
Mathematics Institute and Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick
Daniel Kral is one of the top young mathematicians in the country working in the area of combinatorics. One of his major results is that the number of perfect matchings in a cubic graph is exponential: previously, even obtaining superlinear lower bounds had been a significant challenge. He has also proved interesting “removal lemmas” for systems of equations in subsets of finite fields and more general Abelian groups, and shown that a permutation of the first n integers that mixes up the ordering of a random four points with the expected frequencies must be quasirandom, and therefore for any fixed k must mix up the ordering of k points with the expected frequencies as well. These are just a few of his results, several of which, including the three just mentioned, have solved significant open problems.
http://www.ucw.cz/~kral/
Dr David Loeffler
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
and
Dr Sarah Zerbes
Department of Mathematics, University College London
A Philip Leverhulme Prize in Mathematics and Statistics is awarded to Dr David Loeffler and Dr Sarah Zerbes for their joint work in Number Theory. Their outstanding achievement is the construction of an Euler System associated with the convolution of modular forms. Euler Systems have been viewed as particularly important since the first one was produced by Kolyvagin and used to prove cases of the conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer concerning the arithmetic of elliptic curves. The results of Loeffler and Zerbes have similarly impressive applications.
Since Kolyvagin’s work, only a handful of new Euler systems have been found, all by extremely special methods. A particular attraction of the methods of Loeffler and Zerbes is that their approach promises to be effective in broader circumstances.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/people/staff/david_loeffler/
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucahsze/index.html
Professor Richard Samworth
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Richard Samworth is awarded a Phillip Leverhulme for his broad and influential foundational and methodological contributions to many areas of Statistics, including non-parametric maximum likelihood, classification; high-dimensional penalised regression and model selection; density estimation; and the bootstrap. His seminal contributions on nonparametric classification, one of the most important and rapidly growing areas on the interface between Statistics and Machine Learning, have had a profound impact on the development of the field. He has also demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities in his activities on behalf of many of the world’s leading statistical societies and journals, and his work in building up Statistics within the University of Cambridge.
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~rjs57/
Dr Corinna Ulcigrai
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
Dr Corinna Ulcigrai has made major contributions to ergodic theory and dynamical systems and is acknowledged as one of the leaders of her generation in those fields. In particular, in a paper based on her PhD thesis she has solved an important long-standing problem on the ergodic properties of locally Hamiltonian flows on surfaces by showing that typically such flows are not mixing. With K. Fraczek she also proved an important result that surprised leading experts in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics from both mathematics and physics. This result shows that, for a broad class of billiard dynamics that includes the 100 year old Ehrenfest model describing a particle in a period array of square scatterers, the system is not ergodic in most directions. In addition, with her collaborators, she has proved important and deep results about the ergodic properties of several important classes of dynamical systems such as interval exchange maps and Teichmüller dynamics.
http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/people/profile/maxcu
Philosophy and Theology
Dr Jonathan Birch
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
Evolutionary theory offers to explain cooperative social behaviour in a wide range of species. Jonathan Birch works on the conceptual foundations of a widely accepted framework for understanding co-operation, namely, W.D. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness. One of the very few philosophers to have studied this theory and its applications in depth, Birch is contributing to the amendment and expansion of the theory, and helping to adjudicate sharp controversies among biologists on theories of kin selection. His work is important not only to the philosophy of biology, and to a sophisticated philosophical understanding of evolutionary theory, but also to the way unnoticed conceptual differences can illuminate disagreement in natural science. He has contributed to the philosophy of language by indicating how the content of signals can be related to evolutionary dynamics, and he is embarking on a project that locates the role of prosocial emotions and normative judgement in the evolution of human social and ethical life. This work promises to develop philosophy at its boundary with current work in psychology, economics and anthropology.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/people/birch.aspx
Dr Tim Button
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Tim Button has made insightful contributions to the philosophy of logic and mathematics. His work makes distinctive and impressive use of technical results and shows how these results can be used as useful tools in developing and exploring deep philosophical themes. In particular, his recent book, The Limits and Reasons (OUP, 2013), has reopened the debate about internal and external realism to great acclaim, a debate which has been recently ignored by the analytic tradition. He argues that we are epistemologically placed somewhere between the poles of being radically deceived and always right, but we cannot hope to say exactly where.
http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/tecb2/
Professor Ofra Magidor
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford
Professor Ofra Magidor has established an international reputation in philosophy by working across the fields of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics. She uses the impetus of particular, and apparently narrow, philosophical questions – about category mistakes, for example, or about vagueness – to present radical reorientations of wide philosophical areas, especially by ranging across the sub-disciplines in the subject. Her 2013 book, Category Mistakes, revives an old problem in philosophy first articulated by Aristotle and exploited by Ryle in tackling the mind/body problem. Magidor’s comprehensive reassessment considers the varieties of ways in which category mistakes might be explained, and concludes that such mistakes are indeed meaningful, but that they fail to fulfil conversational presuppositions: so the explanation of the phenomenon is properly given by a pragmatic account. This account of what may seem a small problem has broad and important implications, not only for the philosophy of language, but also for metaphysics. Further, Magidor has published important work on other topics – on ‘semantic sovereignty’ (on the relation between semantic and physical facts, or facts about use); on arbitrary reference; on strict finitism in mathematics; and on possible worlds and the restriction of epistemic transparency. She will use the award to pursue further her interests in metaphysics (on endurantism and perdurantism), in the philosophy of language and logic (on vagueness, and on conditionals); and to finish another book connecting problems in the philosophy of language with metaphysics (beginning from arbitrary reference and semantic sovereignty).
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball1646/
Dr Anna Mahtani
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics
Anna Mahtani is a scholar specialising in formal epistemology whose work displays the depth of insight achievable by the deployment of formal techniques on traditional problems concerning probability and decision making, and also on the foundations of the so-called ‘epistemicism’ position on vagueness. Also characteristic of her work is an eschewal of speculation in favour of well-grounded results concerning fundamental questions, not peripheral ones. Her current work on the intensionality of deference in decision making promises to be of the utmost significance.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/people/mahtani.aspx
Dr Holger Zellentin
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham
Dr Holger Zellentin has already established himself as one of the outstanding experts on the relation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the formative ‘late antique’ period. Internationally educated at Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Jerusalem and Princeton, he is now Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. His first monograph, Rabbinic Parodies of Jewish and Christian Literature, re-evalutes the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Mesopotamia from the 4th to 7th centuries CE through a new analysis of the rabbis’ use of satire. His second book, The Qur’an’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as Point of Departure reassesses the foundational legal principles and laws of the Qur’an by demonstrating its points of overlap and continuity with the influential Christian church-order text, the Didascalia. Dr Zellentin has also recently edited a large survey volume on Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity. He is now working on two further monographs: one on Ritual and Law in the Qur’an and in the Late Ancient Near East, the other a further study of early rabbinical thought in context: Rabbinic Rhetoric Under the Cross. His broad intellectual goal for the future is to gain a yet fuller appreciation of the complex mutual influences of Jews, Christians and Muslims in this crucial period of development and transition.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/theology/people/holger.zellentin
Sociology and Social Policy
Dr Lucie Cluver
Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
Lucie Cluver conducts world leading research on the complex and extensive hazards that face AIDS-affected children. Her work has focused, for instance, on the psychological issues that AIDS-orphaned children encounter and also on how parental AIDS-illness increases child abuse and sexual risk behaviours amongst adolescent girls. These insights into the impact of AIDS on young people have led to a raft of research papers and significant funded projects that have had important results. For example, the fact that family-focused cash transfers alone are sufficient to reduce HIV-risk behaviour amongst adolescent girls, while cash + care schemes are required to produce a similar effect amongst adolescent boys is a significant finding and one that has had important practical results. The implementation of policies based on Dr Cluver’s research by governments in sub-Saharan Africa have seen 10,000 community workers trained to develop programmes for millions of AIDS-affected children in sub-Saharan Africa. The Leverhulme Prize will be used to further this work, and specifically to test the innovative integration of social welfare and abuse reduction on adolescent HIV-risk – these interventions having the potential to interrupt the negative pathways that are started by parental AIDS (increased poverty, school drop-out, mental health distress and increased transactional sexual relationships).
https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/profile/cluver.html
Dr Hazem Kandil
Sociology Department, University of Cambridge
Dr Hazem Kandil is an outstanding scholar, who broke new ground with his analysis of the Egyptian regime and the 2011 uprising, published in a 2012 monograph, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. He followed this with the first in-depth study of the Muslim Brotherhood and its relationship with its own members (Inside the Brotherhood, 2014). He is regarded as a scholar of international standing and a leading authority on recent political events in Egypt, who has successfully challenged consensus views by articulating a clear and comprehensively researched analysis, which has advanced understanding of the coercive state, and the longer term relationships between political, military and security institutions. Dr Kandil makes extensive use of archival research, analysis of historical documents and interviews with key figures. These enable him to support his claims and develop his novel theoretical positions. Dr Kandil’s work has proved highly influential and has received extensive international attention from academia, media and government officials. His next book on Power Triangle: Military, Security and Politics in Regime Change, develops his theoretical model of the uneasy relationship between military, political, and security institutions, applying it to both Turkey and Iran. His future work will extend his interest in the military factor in social development, initially with a study of the institutional basis of American war doctrine; and subsequently extending further his national and historical sweep with a study of conscription, focusing on case studies of Egypt and France.
http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/hkandil
Dr Victoria Redclift
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey
Victoria Redclift is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her methodologically and theoretically groundbreaking research is focused on new forms of political engagement in South Asia, exploring the formal and informal dimensions of practices of citizenship. Her highly topical work on the Urdu speaking community in Bangladesh at a time of transition to full citizenship brings together issues of belonging, space and rights in a context of statelessness, displacement and ongoing nation-state formation. Dr Redclift’s research works within, and pushes the boundaries of contemporary scholarship on citizenship, ethnicity and postcolonial theory, particularly around ethnic relations, political process and the challenges of diverse religious identities within modern nation-states. Her monograph, published in 2013, Statelessness and Citizenship: camps and the creation of political space, was shortlisted for the Philip Abrams prize in 2014. Dr Redclift’s new work, supported by the Philip Leverhulme Prize, builds on this important work to explore the transnational dimensions of citizenship experiences among the Bengali Muslim diaspora in Britain and the US (at a time when issues of religious identity and transnational politics are at the forefront of concern). Dr Redclift’s combination of empirical exploration, theoretical interrogation and non-academic engagement promises to provide important illumination into these complex and crucial issues.
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/sociology/people/victoria_redclift/
Dr Katherine Smith
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Dr Katherine Smith is a Reader in Social Policy whose research into the policy and legislative developments of public health and health inequalities is of international significance. Of note are her investigations into the ways in which stakeholders from commercial, academic, and third sector organisations influence health and social policies. Her work is truly interdisciplinary and through publishing extensively in sociological, medical, policy, and social policy journals she speaks to diverse audiences. She is the author of the monograph Beyond Evidence Based Policy in Public Health: the Interplay of Ideas, which is a groundbreaking analysis of the complex interplay between ideas, evidence and policy, and is based on over a hundred interviews with key informants (e.g. ministers, civil servants, researchers, advisors and journalists). It provides an extraordinary insight into how policies are negotiated, constructed and ‘made’. Supported by the Philip Leverhulme Prize she will extend this research through an exploration into how members of the public engage with issues of health inequalities. She intends to deploy and develop a range of methodological tools to enhance what has come to be referred to as ‘deliberative democracy’. Such public engagement has the potential to draw the public in the policy process and to contribute to tackling the tenacious problem of health inequalities.
http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/social_policy/katherine_smith
Dr Imogen Tyler
Sociology Department, University of Lancaster
Imogen Tyler has received a number of awards and has made a major contribution to the study of inequalities. She has critically examined the processes of protest and resistance in the UK. She has an international profile and has focused on the issue of stigma, which she plans to study in more detail. She is engaged politically and practically and has played an important role in shaping thinking in these key areas of social policy. Her book Revolting Subjects has been very well received and was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing in 2014.
http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/imogen-tyler%28b10d1ced...
Dr Richard Alexander
University of Leicester
Theoretical astrophysics
Dr Stefan Kraus
University of Exeter
High-angular resolution studies on star and planet formation
Dr Mathew Owens
University of Reading
Solar and heliospheric physics
Dr Mark Swinbank
Durham University
Galaxy formation and evolution, gravitational lensing, star formation
Dr John (Southworth) Taylor
University of Keele
Extrasolar planets
Dr Jane Cooley Fruehwirth
University of Cambridge
Applied microeconomics, social economics, education policy, policy evaluation
Dr Haider Butt
University of Birmingham
Electrical engineering: nanotechnology
Professor Bharathram Ganapathisubramani
University of Southampton
Fluid mechanics
Dr Eileen Gentleman
King’s College London
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine
Dr Aline Miller
University of Manchester
Engineering the self-assembly of biomolecules for regenerative medicine
Dr Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena
Imperial College London
Mechatronics in medicine
Dr Ben Anderson
Durham University
Cultural and political geography
Dr Dabo Guan
University of Leeds
Climate change mitigation and adaptation
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright
University of Oxford
Environment, health and development in China
Dr Erin McClymont
Durham University
Past climate and environmental change
Dr Colin McFarlane
Durham University
Urban geography
Dr David Nally
University of Cambridge
Historical and political geography
Dr Lindsay Stringer
University of Leeds
Environmental change and sustainable development in drylands
Dr Kathryn Banks
Durham University
French literature, especially French renaissance and the specifics of literary ‘thinking’
Dr Andrew Counter
King’s College London
Nineteenth-century French literature and culture
Professor Sally Faulkner
University of Exeter
Spanish cinema
Dr Lara Feigel
King’s College London
Late modernist literature and culture with a focus on the period 1930–1949
Dr David James
Queen Mary, University of London
Twentieth-century and contemporary writing
Dr James Smith
Durham University
Twentieth-century English literary and cultural history
Dr Hannah Sullivan
University of Oxford
Modern British and American literature, modernism, genetic criticism, poetry
Mr Martin Callanan
Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Electronic, online and networked art
Dr Nadia Davids
Queen Mary, University of London
Performance as a means of animating memory, historiography and archive
Dr James Moran
University of Nottingham
Twentieth-century theatre and performance
Dr Tim Smith
Birkbeck, University of London
Film perception, eyetracking and real-world visual cognition
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Dr Richard Alexander
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester
Richard Alexander is one of the leading star-formation theorists of his generation, and has written important papers on photo evaporation, protoplanetary disc evolution and dispersal, and on accretion discs. His skills include pertinent numerical simulations as well as semi-analytical calculations. He is an original thinker and his work is making a significant international impact in a number of fields.
Dr Stefan Kraus
School of Physics, University of Exeter
Stefan Kraus has produced pioneering work in the field of aperture synthesis at infra-red wavelengths. He has exploited these challenging techniques in various fields including planet formation and young stellar objects; for example, in a recent first-author Nature paper he and his team presented the first unambiguous detection of a circumstallar disc around a forming high-mass star. He has written extremely high quality papers that show he is truly a leader in stellar interferometry.
Dr Mathew Owens,
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
Matthew Owens is an associate professor at Reading who has developed a world-leading reputation in solar system physics, notably on the evolution of the heliospheric magnetic field. This continuation of the Sun’s magnetic field into interplanetary space is a key to understanding how the Sun influenced climate in the distant past and how space weather continues to affect the Earth and space satellites today. Dr Owens uses a combination of computational modelling and spacecraft observations to determine the evolution of the Sun’s magnetic field. He interprets ice-core observations going back 10,000 years and makes current space weather forecasts. His national and international standing is evidenced by the award of the Royal Astronomical Society Fowler Award, his appointment as associate editor of one of the main journals in the field, and his recent keynote speech at one of the main international conferences in solar system physics.
Dr Mark Swinbank
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Durham University
Mark Swinbank has pioneered studies of star formation and dynamics within distant galaxies. He has exploited use of 3D spectro-imaging to study the motions of stars and gas in young galaxies and to relate these to theoretical models of galaxy formation achieving this using integral field unit (IFU) spectrographs with adaptive optics on, for example, the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescopes. He has also taken advantage of the magnifying of distant galaxies by intervening galaxies along the line-of-sight called gravitational lenses. He is playing a leading role in defining major observational programmes for much current and next-generation instrumentation. He has written a series of outstanding and highly original papers that have had important influence on the field of observational cosmology and galaxy evolution.
Dr John Taylor (Southworth)
School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, Keele University
John Taylor is an observational astrophysicist focussing on the area of extrasolar planets who combines an expertise in instrumental techniques with a deep physical insight. Writing under the name John Southworth, Dr Taylor is a prolific publisher of highly-cited work with over one hundred articles published to date. His achievements include a now widely-used methodology for extracting the surface gravity of transiting exoplanets, and exploitation of the ‘de-focussed photometry’ technique to obtain high-quality datasets on such systems. He has enhanced the value of his work by making his computer code and results available to the entire research community.
Economics
Dr Jane Cooley Fruehwirth
Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Jane Fruehwirth has an outstanding portfolio of research in the broad area of applied microeconomics and has established herself as a promising young leader in the economics of education. She has made significant advances toward the better understanding of peer effects in education (how pupils benefit from the presence of others), one of the most difficult problems in the economics of education. Pursuing an innovative equilibrium approach she developed a new method to identify peer effects. She has also made important contributions towards measuring the effects of postgraduate education and the consequences of grade retention. Overlapping with her research on education is her work on racial inequality and her findings on the role of race for peer effects have important implications for desegregation policies. Dr Fruehwirth’s work displays formidable skill and a great eye for socially important problems.
Engineering
Dr Haider Butt
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cambridge
Haider Butt conducts pioneering research concerning the use of nano-materials to develop novel optical devices. In particular, he has been able to produce optical holograms from arrays of so-called carbon nanotubes (CNTs), tiny tubes consisting of rolled up graphene sheets. The small pixel size achievable with CNTs and their unique optical properties may pave the way for future applications ranging from high volume data storage to the motion projection of three-dimensional, life-like images.
Professor Bharathram Ganapathisubramani
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton
Bharathram Ganapathisubramani is distinguished for his research in the area of experimental fluid mechanics through novel work on the exploration of the physics of fluids, coupled to the development of advanced diagnostic methods. His work includes measurements of velocity fields using non-invasive laser diagnostics, delivering insights into the mechanisms responsible for generating drag in turbulent flows. The problem of turbulence remains one of the most challenging in classical physics and represents a key field to unlock new innovations in aerospace engineering and other sectors. Professor Ganapathisubramani’s methods have been adopted by many international research groups and his research is supported by industry and a range of highly competitive grants.
Dr Eileen Gentleman
Department of Craniofacial Development and Stem Cell Biology, King’s College London
Eileen Gentleman is a rising star in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. An experimental scientist, her research is highly interdisciplinary, combining materials science and engineering with fundamentals of developmental and mechanobiology. Of particular note, Dr Gentleman has experimentally demonstrated important differences in the quality of the bone formed from stem cells when isolated from different sources. Furthermore, she has shown that these differences might impact on how well engineered bone would function if used therapeutically in patients. Although controversial just a few years ago, her conclusions on bone formed from embryonic stem cells are now widely accepted and her methods are regularly used by others. She has also contributed to high impact publications in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Materials on fundamental aspects of biomineralisation in bone and the cardiovascular system. In addition to Dr Gentleman’s publication record, which is outstanding for an early career researcher, she continues to draw recognition from her peers. She has been invited to speak at universities around the UK and has given numerous research presentations at international conferences, most notably in the USA at the annual meeting of the Orthopaedic Research Society.
Dr Aline Miller
Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, University of Manchester
Aline Miller is one of the leading interdisciplinary researchers of her generation. She was awarded her PhD in 2000 in polymer chemistry from Durham University where she won several awards. With this as a springboard, she was awarded a College Junior Research Fellowship to work with Professor Dame Athene Donald in the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. After holding this Fellowship for only a year, based on her track record and potential she was appointed a lecturer in chemical engineering at the University of Manchester. Her work spans a wide area within the remit of biomolecular engineering, with particular emphasis on controlling molecular- and micro-structure of materials over a range of length scales to produce a defined function. In 2008 she was awarded the MacroGroup UK Young Researchers Medal and the Polymer Physics Group Young Researchers Lecture Award. This novel work resulted in a new class of hydrogel for use as cell scaffolds, and was taken up by Smith and Nephew for initial trials. Her group is also developing a platform technology based on self-assembling peptides (this includes four patents) and expanding into two areas: the development of smart materials for targeted drug delivery and for biocatalytic chemical transformations.
Dr Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London
Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena has gained an international reputation for innovative research into medical robotics. This has already led to clinical trials for knee arthroplasty, which represents a breakthrough in the field. Other aspects of his research cover automatic drug delivery with in-situ diagnostics, control of surgical instruments when interfacing with soft and hard tissue, and the correct functionality of steerable miniaturized medical delivery systems through path planning and control. The future applications of his findings will have a notable influence on medical treatments in the future. His research demonstrates the great benefits that can be achieved when engineering principles are directed towards an interdisciplinary field.
Geography
Dr Ben Anderson
Department of Geography, Durham University
Ben Anderson has established world-leading expertise in cultural and political geography, particularly in terms of his contributions to scholarship across the social sciences and humanities on the spatial politics of affect and emotion. His work is characterised by intellectual leadership in the application of these theoretical concerns to the study of contemporary geographies of power and emergency. He has published widely on these topics in the leading geographical and interdisciplinary journals and will reach a wider audience still with his imminent monograph. The Philip Leverhulme Prize will enable him to further develop his research agenda on how events classified as emergencies are governed.
Dr Dabo Guan
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds
Dabo Guan is currently an associate professor in the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, and a senior member of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. He has a growing international reputation for research in environmental resources accounting, climate change mitigation in developing countries, and climate change adaptation economics. These research activities have led to nearly fifty publications (including in the journals Nature Climate Change and Global Environmental Change) and the role of lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change AR5 Working Group II.
The award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize will be used to develop a new concept of ‘disaster footprint’ analysis in the field of climate change adaptation. This will provide an accounting framework for measuring the direct and indirect socioeconomic impact of a disaster event across both the disaster region and wider economic systems and social networks.
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright
School of Geography, University of Oxford
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright is a Lecturer in the Human Geography of China at the University of Oxford. Her daring and truly innovative research on the human and environmental cost of development in China has established her as a researcher of international standing and has demonstrated the value of in-depth human geographical study in an increasingly interdisciplinary research environment. Based on 20 months of ethnographic research in rural China, her first book, Fighting for Breath (2013), explores how Chinese villagers understand and respond to illness and development, using rich descriptions of everyday life to convey the deep social suffering and injustice which characterise much of the villagers’ experience. Her subsequent research and publications on living with pollution in China identify how ideas of a ‘good life’ vary according to cultural, political and economic contexts, and trace previously unrecognised patterns in citizen activism and its limits. Dr Lora-Wainwright’s work is inspiring because of her linguistic and cross-cultural skills which have enabled her to collect original data in sensitive field work contexts. She is one of the first Western geographers to work across disciplines in China and with both local governments and citizens to tackle the challenges of pollution. Her research on the interplay between science and politics documents the development of lay–expert collaborations in rural China and has been translated into different languages. As such, Dr Lora-Wainwright is unique in making important theoretical, empirical and policy impacts in different national contexts.
Dr Erin McClymont
Department of Geography, Durham University
Erin McClymont, an internationally renowned paleoclimatologist, employs biomarkers to reconstruct past environmental conditions and associated climate changes through examination of the evidence preserved within sediment records. More specifically, she applies novel organic chemistry techniques to marine sediments to identify high temporal resolution changes in temperature over the last four million years. Significant research grants have been awarded to fund this work, most recently from the Natural Environment Research Council, Research Council of Norway and the Academy of Finland. Dr McClymont’s achievements lie in her skills as an organic geochemist to develop geochemical proxies to reconstruct past ocean temperatures, and in her contributions to our understanding of the mid-Pleistocene transition, which has important implications for our consideration of the sensitivity of climate change to natural mechanisms. A key contribution has involved the creation of a new data set of sea surface temperatures for around one million years ago, which demonstrates that oceans begin to cool ahead of ice-sheet expansion, meaning that ice-sheets are not driving the reconstructed climate change as some believed. She has established a strong body of published work in leading academic journals, while other measures of esteem include numerous international invitations to present at major conferences and meetings and a growing list of national and international research collaborations. Alongside all these research activities Dr McClymont is also engaged in outreach activities to promote public understanding and engagement such as the Climate Change Schools Project.
Dr Colin McFarlane
Department of Geography, Durham University
Colin McFarlane has established himself as a leading international figure in comparative and informal urbanism in the global South. He has pioneered studies which consider urban life through the lens of everyday experience as a basis for understanding contemporary urbanisation. He has also brought his intellect to bear upon the pressing issue of what it means to conduct comparative urban research in today’s interconnected world, in a way that cuts across established divisions between global North and South. As such, his growing international reputation has put him at the forefront of both substantive urban and methodological debates. He plans to extend this reputation by opening up a new research frontier around the urbanisation of human waste, one which ties together his work on informality, experience, and urban settlements.
Dr David Nally
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
David Nally is an outstanding and imaginative scholar who has made a marked contribution to contemporary understandings of global food security challenges through drawing on his work on the Great Irish Famine. Human Encumbrances is the first major work to apply the critical perspectives of famine theory and postcolonial studies to the causes and history of the famine, and combines an impressive range of archival sources, including contemporary critiques of British famine policy, to argue that the famine was an expression of political violence and specifically a form of colonial biopolitics intended to redraw the political landscape of Ireland. His future work will explore the ways in which the ‘problem of hunger’ is constructed through the lens of ‘food security’ and the implications for efforts to address global hunger.
Dr Lindsay Stringer
School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds
Since completing her PhD in 2005, Lindsay Stringer has further developed her academic expertise in the area of policy related to the management of drylands. She has augmented our understanding of the relationships between desertification and climate change, playing an important role in the work of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Lindsay’s work seeks to bridge the gap between the science and policy-making communities in this critical area of research and practice, particularly in southern Africa. She directs the Sustainability Research Institute at Leeds University and is well-placed to strengthen her research networks and activities over the years ahead.
Modern Languages and Literature
Dr Kathryn Banks
Department of Modern Languages, Durham University
Kathryn Banks has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for her research on the specificity of literary thinking relative to other forms of thought in the early modern period. This long-term project, which investigates how literature functioned as a tool for thought rather than simply a vehicle, is unfolding across three interrelated monographs. The first, Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance (2008), shows how poetry’s deployment of images contributed to fundamental Reformation questions about the relationship between God, ‘man’ and the world. The second, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and to be published in 2014, uses literature to provide insights into apocalyptic thinking by juxtaposing Reformation apocalypticism with conceptions of literature as prophecy. The third, initiated during a research lectureship funded by Terence Cave’s international Balzan project, will explore the relation between literary thinking and cognitive neuroscience, taking the writings of François Rabelais as a test case for the way literature employs figurative movement to exploit brain responses resembling those produced by actual movement.
Dr Andrew Counter
Department of French, King’s College London
Andrew Counter has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his interdisciplinary research on nineteenth-century French culture, which explores the relation of literature to its legal and political contexts. His monograph Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge and the Family (2010) is the first critical overview of the omnipresent theme of inheritance in nineteenth-century French literature. Drawing on both canonical and little-known texts from across the century, he establishes a dialogue between literary plots and socio-historical issues deriving from post-Revolutionary changes to marriage and property law. His next book will address the interface of politics with love, sex and desire during the Bourbon Restoration of 1815–1830. It will draw on a wide range of primary sources to provide a multi-layered account of thinking about sexuality during a distinctive and relatively short-lived historical regime. Two of Counter’s published essays have won prestigious prizes: the 2011 Malcolm Bowie Prize for ‘One of Them: Homosexuality and Anarchism in Wilde and Zola’, and the 2013 Forum for Modern Languages Prize for ‘Astolphe de Custine and the querelle d’Olivier: Gossip in Restoration High Society’.
Professor Sally Faulkner
Department of Modern Languages, University of Exeter
Sally Faulkner has written extensively, with originality and authority, on Spanish film, and has identified new and important grounds in modern Spanish culture, such as the ‘middlebrow’. Her contribution to the fields of Hispanic studies and film studies is an impressive one for a researcher at this stage in her career. Her track record of publications is exceptionally strong, with three single-authored monographs, an edited collection, and further work in preparation. Her monographs carve out a distinctive approach to screen studies and Spanish culture that has been widely recognised nationally and internationally. A successful history of grant capture to support her work is testimony to the high regard in which she is held. Her work in the leadership and direction of research as Director of Research for Modern Languages, and as the founder and director of the Centre for Translating Cultures in the University of Exeter, demonstrate her to be one who is active in the promotion and stimulation of original research in others. The international regard for Dr Faulkner’s work is attested to by her delivery of key-note speeches in the UK and internationally, her invited contributions to edited volumes and involvement with research centres and projects at UK, US and Spanish institutions.
Dr Lara Feigel
Department of English, King’s College London
In her copious work on the literature of the 1930s and 1940s, Lara Feigel has succeeded in reaching a wide audience while maintaining the highest academic standards. Her first book, based on her PhD thesis, Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930–1945 (2010), investigated the complex relationship between politically-engaged literature and cinema in this period. She followed it with a highly innovative and widely reviewed book, The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War, a collective biography of Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay and Hilde Spiel in and after the War, which draws extensively on archives and presents a vivid and detailed picture and analysis of these writers’ fiction within their biographical and historical contexts. She has a strong record of public engagement, besides supervising numerous doctoral students. Her future project will draw on her familiarity with German to study the work of British and American writers and film-makers in Germany in the immediate postwar period.
Dr David James
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London
David James is the author of two monographs and two edited volumes on twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature. His first monograph, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008), explores how fictional landscapes become a site of literary experimentation. His second monograph, Modernist Futures (2012), advances a revisionist account of the way we think of postmodernist literature, focusing on the local insertion of literature and its moral and political engagement, rather than foregrounding self-referentiality and literary play. In so doing, he also helps us rethink the afterlife of modernist literature. His work has been called ‘field-defining’ as he changes a ‘reigning paradigm’. Despite his prolific writing, referees praise him for his refined sense of form and style as well as his collegiality, expressed through his untiring efforts to advance the discipline, notably in establishing a book series on contemporary literature with Columbia University Press. His current project is entitled ‘consolation and the novel in an age of terror’.
Dr James Smith
Department of English Studies, Durham University
James Smith, Lecturer in English at Durham University, has produced ground-breaking work on modernist literature and the British intelligence services. The recent opening of previously closed security files enabled him to undertake extraordinarily interesting research published by Cambridge University Press as British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930–1960 (2013). Smith’s discoveries have wide-ranging implications for our knowledge of the relationship between literature, culture and politics in the twentieth century. He has also completed a range of complementary studies: on the interest taken by the intelligence services in Soviet films in the 1930s, on the relations between several key modernist authors and fascism, and on what happened when the Berliner Ensemble theatre company first visited London. He has opened up a whole new field and he will devote his Philip Leverhulme Prize to a study of the most rewarding subject of the role of the British Council in international cultural and literary affairs during the Cold War.
Dr Hannah Sullivan
Faculty of English, University of Oxford
Hannah Sullivan is the author of The Work of Revision (2013), a groundbreaking account of the effects of technology on the compositional practices of twentieth-century authors. Through archival study and close textual analysis, Sullivan demonstrates the effects of the typewriter and personal computer not only on the processes of literary production but, more importantly, on literary style itself. Developing the methods employed in her first monograph, and benefiting from previous collaborations with Google Books, Sullivan will use computational analysis in her next project to uncover prosodic constraints within free verse.
Performing and Visual Arts
Mr Martin Callanan
Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Martin Callanan’s practice has already reached significant national and international exposure, through projects that manifest themselves physically, as well as online. His practice investigates image and object through a technological vernacular, but this is tempered by an overarching notion of the individual within a hyper-connected series of systems and structures. Callanan’s practice reflects a pertinent moment in the ongoing negotiation of contemporary art’s relationship with technology, with a clear emphasis on the relevance of studio practice and its myriad potential through different modes of production. Callanan’s practice includes photography, video, and a broad spectrum of other electronic media. The commitment and energy that Callanan brings to his practice is demonstrated by his inclusion in over eighty-six exhibitions in 25 countries since his graduation in 2005. Recent projects include solo presentations at Noshowspace (London), Or Gallery (Berlin), and Horrach Moya Gallery (Spain).
Dr Nadia Davids
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London
Even if one were to ignore the content of her works, Nadia Davids would be a rare figure in dramatic studies: a successful and widely performed playwright and theatre-maker who also operates as a sophisticated cultural scholar. That her productions, both scholarly and dramatic, tackle such under-documented subjects as the experience of Muslim and ‘Coloured’ women in South Africa makes her almost unique. The peculiar and important nexus she inhabits was demonstrated by her referees for the Philip Leverhulme Prize being drawn not only from the academic field but from amongst South Africa’s leading theatre-makers. Her proposed topic of research, archiving the Prestwich Place slave-burial ground in Cape Town through both scholarly and performative modes, epitomises the innovative nature of her work.
Dr James Moran
School of English, University of Nottingham
James Moran is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham and an outstanding specialist in twentieth-century Irish and English drama. His research is particularly concerned with analysing the local particularities involved in the production and reception of modernist literature and drama, which are central concerns in his monographs The Theatre of Sean O’Casey, Irish Birmingham and Staging the Easter Rising. Dr Moran is also active as a broadcaster and since 2010 has presented a monthly book review for BBC Radio Nottingham, where he has focused on local writers.
He is currently writing a book about the theatrical thinking of DH Lawrence, and his future work concentrates on the overlooked dramatic writings of a broader group of anglophone high-modernists, including Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. These figures are often best remembered for writing novels or poems, but Moran explores the place of their plays within the modernist canon, and analyses their negotiations between local and international affiliations.
Dr Tim Smith
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London
Tim Smith’s practice has a clearly defined interest in cognitive psychology and technology. His investigations into visual media have been of significant academic impact, with particular reference to his work in moving image and contributions to the growing field of cognitive film studies. Although Smith’s work has an inter-disciplinary aspect which is highly invested within the scientific study of cognitive development, autism, and psychology, his practice manifests itself in projects which have a clear relevance to the visual arts. Recent indications of this are exemplified by his work with Tate Britain and the perceptual consequence of the restoration of John Martin’s Destruction of Pompeii & Herculaneum (1821). Another project has seen Smith working with highly sophisticated computer-aided animation in conjunction with Dreamworks in the USA. His most recently published work ‘Watching You Watch Movies’ is included in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies (2013), published by Oxford University Press.
Dr Patrick Finglass
University of Nottingham
Archaic and classical Greek poetry, especially Stesichorus, Pindar and Sophocles
Professor Miriam Leonard
University College London
Classical reception, intellectual history, Greek literature and philosophy
Dr Michael Squire
King’s College London
The intersection between Graeco-Roman visual and literary cultures
Dr Peter Thonemann
University of Oxford
The history and culture of pre-Islamic Turkey
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos
University of Nottingham
Ancient Greek history
Dr Matt Friedman
University of Oxford
Vertebrate palaeontology and evolution
Dr Richard Katz
University of Oxford
The physics of magma genesis and transport in the convecting mantle
Dr Kirsty Penkman
University of York
The application of analytical chemistry to geochronology, archaeology and earth science
Dr Laura Robinson
University of Bristol
The use of chemical tools to examine ocean-climate linkages today and in the past
Dr Paul Williams
University of Reading
Geophysical fluid dynamics
Dr Jo Applin
University of York
American and European art of the 1950s and 1960s
Dr Matthew Potter
Northumbria University
Visual culture and the construction of national identities
Dr Richard Taws
University College London
Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art and visual culture
Dr Tamara Trodd
University of Edinburgh
For her work on media and technologies in twentieth-century and contemporary art
Dr Leon Wainwright
Open University
The history of modern and contemporary art in Britain and the Caribbean
Dr Kimberley Brownlee
University of Warwick
Legal and moral theory: civil disobedience, ideals, punishment, human rights
Professor James Chalmers
University of Glasgow
Criminal law
Dr Ioannis Lianos
University College London
The interaction of economic thought with the legal system
Dr Marc Moore
University College London
Anglo-American corporate law and governance; capital markets and theory of the firm
Ms Anthea Roberts
London School of Economics and Political Science
Public international law, particularly investment treaty law and arbitration
Dr Toby Gee
Imperial College London
Number theory
Dr Jonathan Marchini
University of Oxford
Statistical genetics
Dr Andre Neves
Imperial College London
Geometric analysis
Dr Christoph Ortner
University of Warwick
Numerical analysis and applied analysis
Professor Lasse Rempe-Gillen
University of Liverpool
Complex dynamics
Dr Duncan Bell
University of Cambridge
The history of imperial ideologies in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain
Dr Alexander Morrison
University of Liverpool
Central Asian history, Russian Imperial history and South Asian history
Dr Sadiah Qureshi
University of Birmingham
Modern history of race, empire and science
Dr Sujit Sivasundaram
University of Cambridge
Modern imperial and world history from 1750–1850, especially Asia and the Pacific
Dr David Todd
King’s College London
Global history of ideas in France and Anglo-French Imperial relations, 1780–1914
Classics
Professor Patrick Finglass
Department of Classics, University of Nottingham
In nine years since the award of his DPhil, Professor Patrick Finglass has established himself as one of the world's leading scholars of Greek lyric and tragic poetry. His monumental commentaries on Sophoclean tragedy (Electra, 2007; Ajax, 2011) are already standard works of reference, a remarkable achievement for a scholar of his age; yet Finglass has produced not only these, but also a third major commentary (on Pindar's Pythian 11, 2007) and a substantial number of magisterial articles, especially on the text and interpretation of Sophocles. His work to date is characterized by an extraordinary combination of the energy and ambition of youth and the erudition and judgement that normally come only with a lifetime's experience. Commentaries on the remaining plays of Sophocles and on the fragments of the lyric poet, Stesichorus, are eagerly awaited; these will further cement what is already a towering international reputation.
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/people/patrick.finglass
Professor Miriam Leonard
Department of Greek and Latin, University College London
Professor Miriam Leonard is a powerful and original voice in the field of classical reception studies. Intellectually imaginative, sensitive and critical, she speaks across disciplines; her internationally-significant work lies at the intersection of Classics and History of Ideas in modern Europe, particularly France and Germany. Her monographs Athens and Paris and Socrates and the Jews explore the ways in which a European identity has been created, and her next book will move beyond classical philosophy to investigate the role of tragedy in the emergence of modernity. Professor Leonard is also an innovative teacher, using Socratic teaching methods and teaching across disciplines. Her work illustrates not only how Classics as a scholarly discipline was formed, but also the enduring power of the classical texts to provide a way of speaking about contemporary societies.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/staff/fulltimestaff/miriamleonard
Dr Michael Squire
Department of Classics, King’s College London
Dr Michael Squire’s research into the visual culture of the Graeco-Roman world has made a fundamental contribution to both classical art history and reception studies, and has changed the way that classicists and art historians think about the relationship between ancient art and literature. Dr Squire has an impressive publication record, which includes three highly-regarded monographs and three edited books. His most recent monograph on the Tabulae Iliacae – the first on the subject in English – was awarded the James R Wiseman Prize by the Archaeological Institute of America, and has been described as “one of the most significant analyses of Graeco-Roman art, replication and collecting in recent years”. The international pedigree of Dr Squire’s research is reflected in the range of journals and books in which he has been published; in the variety of international prizes and fellowships he has won (including the Alexander von-Humboldt Stipendiat in Berlin and Munich); and in the fact that he has published in French, German and Italian, as well as in English. Dr Squire’s current research into the Imagines of Philostratus continues to cross disciplinary boundaries, and it will certainly gain the same sort of international recognition as his previous work.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/classics/people/academic/squire/inde...
Dr Peter Thonemann
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
Dr Peter Thonemann is an ancient Greek historian and epigrapher of extraordinary range and subtlety, whose work – notably his major monograph on the Maeander Valley – has set new standards for research in ancient historical geography. His work integrates the study of all forms of ancient evidence, and deploys innovative theoretical models, to tell an enormously rich story of the interplay between man and landscape across a vast chronological range, from the Iron Age to the 13th century AD. He has also made very substantial contributions to the epigraphy of Asia Minor, and to broader public engagement, not least through his Birth of Classical Europe (co-authored with the late Simon Price). With two substantial edited volumes (on Attalid Asia Minor and on Roman Phrygia), and a major new monograph on the rural societies of Anatolia under way, his stellar research career is well set.
http://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/fellows-staff/academics/dr-peter-thonemann.html
http://mama.csad.ox.ac.uk/
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos
Department of Classics, University of Nottingham
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos is a historian of the ancient Greek world, whose work is notable for asking bold new questions of well-worn topics. Few would have the ambition or the intellectual range to attempt the topic of his first book: a wide-ranging critique of Eurocentric approaches to Greek history, Unthinking the Polis. Dr Vlassopoulos has followed this up with a more broadly accessible work on the legacy of ancient political thought, an ambitious new history of the interactions of Greeks and Barbarians, and more recently he has turned his attention to the subject of Greek slavery, conceiving slavery as a relationship of domination rather than emphasising the slave’s status as property. His work is notable for the depth of his familiarity with historical writing on Greece - in a range of languages and traditions and over a long time period – and for his willingness to relate ancient history to contemporary political issues.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/people/konstantinos.vlassopoulos
Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Dr Matt Friedman
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Matt Friedman is an exceptional young vertebrate palaeontologist who uses a deep knowledge of fish taxonomy and their geological record to answer a wide range of highly topical evolutionary, functional biological and ecological issues. These include the solution of the longstanding controversy on the evolution of flat fishes with the description of a fossil with eye and skull characters intermediate between those of flat and 'normal' fishes. His reconstruction of the evolutionary history of fishes using a number of statistical and phylogenetic models particularly as it relates to mass extinction and recovery in the Upper Cretaceous and succeeding Cenozoic has overturned a number of earlier hypotheses. Thus for example it emphasises that prior to the extinction event, and contrary to prior beliefs, large planktivorous fishes were widely distributed in both Jurassic and Cretaceous oceans and became extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. His detailed analysis of the spiny-finned fishes has demonstrated their explosive diversification following the extinction event and sets the standard for any future phylogenetic and ecological studies.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/academic/mattf
Dr Richard Katz
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Richard Katz is a leading early career mathematical geophysicist whose work is making significant contributions to our understanding of processes involved in the extraction and transportation of melt from deep in the mantle to the surface.
His work to combine physical and chemical parameterizations of melt extraction and flow is having a wide impact as is his establishment of a mathematical framework for two-phase flow in magma migration. The European Geosciences Union has recognized him with an outstanding young scientist award and the European Research Council has awarded him a Starter Grant to investigate coupling of climate with magmatism at mid-ocean ridges.
http://foalab.earth.ox.ac.uk/
Dr Kirsty Penkman
Department of Chemistry, University of York
Understanding past environmental change requires accurate appreciation of when events occurred, which requires reliable dating techniques. Amino acid dating, has long been regarded as being too unreliable yet its appeal in being able to assign the age of death in living organisms has driven Kirsty Penkman to investigate how reliability may be improved. Working with geologists, biologists and chemists, to comprehend and quantify the factors introducing inaccuracies, Penkman has led a major breakthrough in reducing the amino acid dating error. As amino acids are common in many sedimentary sequences since the last ice age, Penkman has used the improved technique to form a new appreciation of stratigraphic sequences within the UK, an impressive feat that has given her significant international visibility. Now established as the world leader in this field, Penkman can look to applying amino acid dating in a variety of key palaeo-environmental problems across the globe.
http://www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/academic/o-s/kpenkman/
Dr Laura Robinson
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Laura Robinson has made leading contributions using a variety of techniques to enable reconstruction of past climate changes over recent glaciations. Key to understanding the mechanisms of climate change is accurately constraining when changes occur, so that the changes can be seen in their correct sequence, and she has used radioactive isotope signals to provide such dating information for major changes in the biological and chemical cycling of nutrients and carbon in the oceans that accompanied the glaciations. Most recently, her study of the radiocarbon signals in Southern Ocean carbonates has provided good evidence for the Southern Ocean as the source of the rising atmospheric CO2 that helped end the last ice age, ushering in the Holocene period of warm climates, during which modern agriculture and civilizations have developed.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/laura-f-robinson/index.html
Dr Paul Williams
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
An innovative and highly original researcher in geophysical fluid dynamics, Dr Paul Williams has made significant contributions to dynamical meteorology and oceanography. In the former field Dr Williams developed an improved numerical time stepping scheme for numerical weather prediction models that has been widely adopted by meteorological agencies around the world, and the scheme has become known as the Robert-Asselin-Williams filter. He has also pioneered the development of a new algorithm for forecasting clear-air turbulence which is a major hazard for the commercial airline industry, injuring hundreds of passengers annually and causing structural damage to aircraft. The turbulence is caused by breaking gravity waves, a phenomenon that Dr Williams has studied both in the laboratory and theoretically. In the oceans gravity waves play an important role in global circulation but they are generally too small to be explicitly represented in ocean circulation models. In recognition of this fact, Dr Williams is also carrying out research on novel stochastic parameterisations to represent these waves, and other small scale dynamical processes, in atmospheric and ocean circulation models.
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~williams/
History of Art
Dr Jo Applin
Department of History of Art, University of York
Dr Jo Applin is an outstanding scholar with a distinctive and strong reputation in sculpture studies. She has already established herself internationally in the field of American & British art post 1960 with her enterprising and insightful style, culminating in the recent publication of her book Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960’s America (Yale 2012). In this invigorating study she explores the work of Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H.C. Westermann and Bruce Nauman opening new and exciting pathways into imagery of the three dimensional object in that period. Her forthcoming monograph on Yayoi Kusame will be the first on the Japanese artist’s period in America in the 1960’s, due to be published in December. Her future plans include a further monograph looking afresh at the artist Lee Lozano and the co-curation of an innovative major international loan exhibition entitled ‘Flesh’ at the newly refurbished York City Art Gallery in 2016, focusing on representations of flesh in the 20th and 21st centuries. This will bring cutting edge art historical scholarship to a wider contemporary public.
http://www.york.ac.uk/history-of-art/staff/applin/
Dr Matthew Potter
Department of Arts, Northumbria University
Dr Matthew Potter’s innovative research resonates across art history and cultural studies and has received international recognition. His contribution to a largely neglected field, the cultural influence of Germany upon British art in the post- Romantic period, is given a clear voice in his most recent book: The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850-1939 (MUP 2012). This study is of major significance, not least in reshaping our understanding of British art during the period, its historiography and cultural identities. His earlier research when he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and at the Menzies Centre, focused upon hybridised identities of British and Australian Anglo-German settlers where he challenged, as he continues to do, core and periphery models. His current research project investigates the construction of national identities in visual culture of the British world. This is effected by an analysis of the afterlife of political prints from the Georgian period over a hundred years of upheaval, stretching from the battle of Waterloo to the First World War and will involve a major re-evaluation of material building upon recent reception studies.
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/arts/staff/M_Potter/
Dr Richard Taws
Department of History of Art, University College London
Richard Taws has built upon a strong existing tradition with regard to the visual culture of the French revolutionary period. His own contribution is, however, brilliantly original. He seizes upon apparently marginal materials like assignats and caricatures to develop searching analyses of the social and political developments of the period. There is a genuine intellectual excitement that characterises all his writing, and his forthcoming book will undoubtedly enhance his already well attested international reputation.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-history/about_us/academic_staff/richard_taws
Dr Tamara Trodd
Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh
In her work on "Art after Photography" and in her studies on the projected image in contemporary art, Dr Trodd seeks to recover what she refers to as "avantgarde technological enthusiasm", that is, exploring how the visual arts are not be understood as oppositional to technology but as legitimate exploiters of any and every technological advance that becomes accessible to the artist. This is, of course, not a uniquely innovative issue for art history: one thinks of the ancient application of the drill to sculpted stone and the Renaissance linkage of oil paint with canvas and the contemporary development of mass-produced prints. By working on the advent of new means of visual expression through new technologies in our own time Tamara Trodd is by no means claiming that such issues are irrelevant to the art of the past. In fact, her work precisely circumvents that kind of rigid compartmentalising by concentrating not only on media-specific works in photography and film but also on the interactions of those media with more traditional forms such as painting, drawing and sculpture. On the basis of an exhaustive exploration of the prinmary material and a sophisticated understanding of the relevant theorteical frameworks, her work has the potential to make a really significant impact in the field; to move the discipline of art history forward and by building a body of publication focussed on those issues, to develop methodological possibilities that other scholars and students will be able to consider and apply.
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/history-ar...
Dr Leon Wainwright
Department of Art History, Open University
Leon Wainwright has a distinguished record of ground-breaking publications which seek to expand the geographical imagination of art history while also ensuring that our histories of the twentieth century are inclusive of the many sites and practices of art making. This does not involve merely adding in artists from the Caribbean or the Subcontinent. The detailed exploration of the artists and their migrations, conversations and transformations of the issues of the modern which clearly and fundamentally include colonial and postcolonial negations is undertaken from hitherto under examined positions and perspectives. In 2011 Leon Wainwright published Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press) on modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire, using the Caribbean as point of shifted perspective on modernism itself. He has written many articles on modernists from both India and the Caribbean, providing the detailed studies of individual careers necessary to avoid the problem of geo-ethnicism. In addition to this specialist area, Leon Wainwright has published extensively and probingly on the challenges facing art history in the current pressure to internationalize and globalise. He has equally made a contribution to art theory and to reshaping the curriculum. The distinction of his work lies in the many forms from detailed cutting edge-scholarship to curriculum initiatives through which Leon Wainwright has challenged the Eurocentrism of the discipline by substantive demonstrations of ways of writing art histories that are sensitive to specificities and expand our conceptions of the world of art. His is a contribution to art made in and in relation to Britain and its imperial histories as well as to the larger picture and process of changing the geographies of the discipline.
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/arthistory/wainwright.shtml
Law
Dr Kimberley Brownlee
Warwick Law School, University of Warwick
Dr Kimberley Brownlee’s work on a broad range of issues in legal, moral, and political philosophy is extremely well regarded, and her distinctive and coherent approach will ensure that she remains a leading figure in this area of study for many years to come. Dr Brownlee has informed her thinking about crucial legal problems by drawing on moral and political ideals and principles in novel and interesting ways, producing cutting edge, highly relevant, and deeply thought out jurisprudential scholarship. Her major project to date has been her book, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in their prestigious Oxford Legal Philosophy series. In this work, Dr Brownlee develops a sustained and compelling case for civil disobedience, and, importantly, provides a careful account of how civil disobedience should be understood and should be distinguished from related attitudes and actions. Conscience and Conviction will surely be a central reference point for any future work done on civil disobedience. Dr Brownlee’s next major project will develop her interesting and novel idea that there is a human right against severe social deprivation, which will have significant implications for the use of quarantine and solitary confinement. Her preliminary work in this area has already been widely discussed: no doubt, her next book, like the one that she has completed, will generate enormous interest. Dr Brownlee’s work is highly significant, and has engaged and stimulated the research of others in a way that is impressive for a young scholar.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/staff/academic/brownlee/
Professor James Chalmers
School of Law, University of Glasgow
James Chalmers is an outstanding young Scots lawyer and one of the strongest criminal lawyers of his age in the UK. He is a brilliant and versatile scholar who writes for audiences at all levels ranging from the first year student to appellate judges. His work is extensive, wide-ranging and influential. He is a prolific doctrinal author with three monographs and three jointly authored articles in the Modern Law Review. These have made a significant impact on law reform and he also has a strong track record in funded research. Despite his Scots Law focus he has nonetheless achieved international recognition. There are few Regius chairs in law in the UK and even fewer held by 36 year olds. James Chalmers has huge potential and a stimulating and innovative project on ‘overcriminalisation’ which will be greatly assisted by the award of a Philip Leverhulme prize.
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/law/staff/jameschalmers/
Dr Ioannis Lianos
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Ioannis Lianos is one of the leading and most respected antitrust/competition law scholars working in the UK today, with a well-established international reputation. His work is interdisciplinary and encompasses both the empirical and theoretical. He works particularly at the interface of competition law and economics, where he employs to formidable effect his expertise and training in microeconomics and sociology as well as law to make a distinctive contribution to a number of important debates. His rigorous publications span a wide area of competition law and include important pieces on the integration of economic concepts in law and of the problems involved in the use of economic expertise in competition litigation, and he has an equal facility in both the substantive and enforcement/procedural fields. He is remarkably active: inter alia he has established two research centres at his university (UCL); is the co-founder of the prestigious Global Competition Law and Economics research conference series; has presented his work at a large number of academic institutions and regulatory authorities around the world; and been appointed to a research chair at the Ecole National d’Administration to lead and manage an interdisciplinary team of researchers studying the impact of the practice of impact assessment in Europe. His current and projected research is highly relevant to policy-making and is having, and should continue to have, significant effects on practice. The Leverhulme prize will enable him to progress his project on the evaluation of economic evidence in the legal framework and its effect on change in economic theory.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?lianos
Dr Marc Moore
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Marc Moore works in the field of Anglo-American corporate law and governance and capital markets. His scholarship is interdisciplinary and sits at the interface of law, economics and social policy. His Leverhulme grant will be used to support research which addresses the issue of whether Anglo-American equity markets are socially relevant today. The panel was impressed by the depth and range of Dr Moore’s existing scholarship and the contemporary relevance of his work. His work undoubtedly offers new insights in the field and his ability and willingness to discuss corporate governance and company law outside of the usual contractarian paradigm is particularly impressive. Dr Moore’s work is highly respected within his home discipline of law as well as outside of it and the Trust was delighted to be able to support work which makes us reconsider and reimagine established academic models.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?moore
Ms Anthea Roberts
Department of Law, London School of Economics
Anthea Roberts is an international lawyer who researches and teaches across an unusually wide range of fields in her subject. She has researched and published on fundamental, general aspects of international law, such as changing approaches to customary international law and the role of national courts in international law, and also more specialized topics such as the interpretation of investment treaties and universal civil jurisdiction. Even when examining relatively narrow, technical fields, she uses general principles as powerful analytical tools, and draws out significant implications for general international law from her studies of particular aspects of it. Across the full range of her work, Ms Roberts maintains a very high quality of research and writing; she is the only sole author to have been twice awarded the Deak Prize for the year’s best article by a scholar under the age of 40 to be published in the prestigious American Journal of International Law. It is noteworthy that the two articles were on very different subjects, demonstrating Ms Roberts’s versatility as well as the consistently high quality of her work. She has already made varied and important contributions to scholarship in international law, and has the potential to continue to do so. For these reasons, Ms Roberts is recognized as one of the leading international lawyers of her generation.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/staff/anthea-roberts.htm
Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Toby Gee
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr. Toby Gee is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in Number Theory. This centres on connections between automorphic forms and Galois Representations, as envisaged by the Langlands Program. His achievements include a complete treatment of companion forms, the proof of the Sato-Tate Conjecture (with Barnet-Lamb and Geraghty), and a substantial contribution to the Buzzard-Diamond-Jarvis conjecture. His solutions of these major outstanding problems use new methods of much wider applicability. They have subsequently driven the subject forward at surprising speed. The new ideas have been synthesized (with Buzzard) into a clear and precise family of general conjectures concerning the fundamental connections of the global Langlands Program.
http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~tsg/
Dr Jonathan Marchini
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
The explosion of genetic science since the first draft sequence of the human genome in 2001 has been accompanied by an explosion in the quantity and complexity of genetic data. At the same time there has been an explosion in the variety and realism of the scientific problems attacked. Traditional statistical methods are quite unsuited to these tasks, and entirely new approaches to statistical modelling, analysis and interpretation are required. Jonathan Marchini has led the way by constructing powerful and ingenious novel statistical methodology for population and medical genetics, together with associated fast computational algorithms and software. The advances he has made in developing this essential statistical theory have been crucial in enabling important new genetic understandings and discoveries.
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~marchini/
Dr Andre Neves
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr Andre Neves is a Reader in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College, London. His field is geometric analysis, an area in which techniques from the analysis of partial differential equations are applied to geometric problems. He has made deep and original contributions to our understanding of the geometry of manifolds in two ways: First, by studying parabolic flows on manifolds. In particular, he studied singularity formation in Lagrangian mean curvature flow and found, in collaboration with Bray, the Yamabe invariant of 3-dimensional real projective space and a counterexample to the weaker version of the Thomas-Yau conjecture on the long term existence and convergence of Lagrangian flows. Second, by studying minimal surfaces on the manifold, in collaboration with Brendle and Marques, he disproved the Min-Oo conjecture, a characterisation of hemispheres of round spheres, which prior to his discovery was widely believed to be true. Recently, with Marques, he made the spectacular announcement of a proof of the Willmore conjecture, one of the big open problems in the field. This conjecture gives a lower bound on the amount of bending energy needed to immerse a torus in three-dimensional space. Its proof, and the powerful min-max theory it uses, has created a lot of excitement and is expected to give a handle to several other hard open problems in the field in the area of geometric analysis.
http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/~aneves/
Dr Christoph Ortner
Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick
Dr Ortner works on some of the central problems in solid mechanics and materials science, in particular on issues relating to atomistic and continuum theories of fracture. He has already established a significant reputation within the area of computational applied mathematics for his work on atomistic models of coarse grained materials. Dr Ortner’s work has created a clear framework to approach the huge mathematical challenges of the field. His development of the theory of atomistic/continuum coupling methods for simulating material defects has filled a crucial gap in knowledge in materials science. However, his work is also distinguished by the way it points forward to the analysis of higher dimensional problems and by its breadth: he has also made important contributions in areas such as the Lavrentiev phenomenon in the Calculus of Variations. Dr Ortner intends to build on this previous research in a number of ways, including project on extensions to surface effects and electronic structure models.
http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/staff/C.Ortner/
Professor Lasse Rempe-Gillen
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool
Professor Rempe-Gillen works in complex dynamics, specializing in the dynamics of transcendental holomorphic functions, a field in which he has made a number of very important contributions. In particular, Prof. Rempe-Gillen has been recognized for his achievements relating to Eremenko’s conjecture. In 2010 he was awarded the London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize for this work. Other significant achievements are the proof (with van Strien) of the density of hyperbolicity for many classes of real transcendental entire functions and circle maps, including the Arnold family, and his demonstration that the escaping set of the exponential map is connected.
Prof. Rempe-Gillen’s current research continues to focus on Eremenko’s Conjecture. His recent work on the topology of Julia sets of transcendental entire functions is directed towards developing a new strategy to construct potential counterexamples. He also aims to pursue further work in measurable transcendental dynamics.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/mathematical-sciences/staff/lasse-rempe/
Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History
Dr Duncan Bell
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Duncan Bell’s writing and research exhibits an unusual range, having made significant contributions to debates in imperial history, intellectual history and International Relations. His first monograph provided a re-appraisal of the idea ‘of Greater Britain’ in which the metropole and the white dominions would be united in some form of federation. The study brought together a discussion of the technologies of empire with an analysis of the role of federation in the thinking of luminaries like J.A. Froude. He has since gone on to explore the role of empire in liberal political thought, including the writings of J.S. Mill, and has completed a second monograph on this subject. The role of the United States in British thinking about federation and empire has been a strand in his earlier research, and he now seeks to tease out the British-American relationship in greater detail.
http://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/contacts/staff/bell-duncan.html
Dr Alexander Morrison
School of History, University of Liverpool
Dr Alexander Morrison is a pioneering young historian of the Russian Empire, whose work on Russia’s expansion into Central Asia in the nineteenth century, based on substantial work in archives in Russia and Central Asia, mounts a serious challenge to standard pictures of Russian imperialism. Dr Morrison, by adopting a rigorously comparative method, steps outside the often inward-looking world of Russian history, to demonstrate clearly that Russia, far from following an imperial Sonderweg, as has routinely been claimed, is directly comparable to other imperial powers, in particular to Great Britain. His project, to write a comprehensive history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia promises to provide the definitive account of a major transformation in global history that was of considerable economic and political significance.
http://liverpool.academia.edu/AlexanderMorrison
Dr Sadiah Qureshi
Department of History, University of Birmingham
Dr Sadiah Qureshi is an outstanding historian of science, trained in both the Natural Sciences (BA) and in the History and Philosophy of Science (MPhil) at Cambridge. She completed her PhD on ‘Human ethnological exhibitions in London, 1800-1855’ at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded interdisciplinary project on Victorian notions of the past: ‘Past and Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, 2006-2010. She won the ‘Best Scholarly illustrated’ award for her book Peoples on parade: Exhibition, empire and anthropology in nineteenth-century Britain (Chicago University Press 2011) from the Association of American University Presses. Dr Qureshi’s work on the commercial exhibition of foreign peoples has made significant contributions to the cultural history of Victorian Britain, studies of race and ethnicity, and the history of science. In her imaginative, subtle and precise analysis, she has overturned assumptions about the lasting importance of such exhibitions and recast them as crucial opportunities for intercultural contact and scientific research in their contemporary context, as well as with lasting relevance for modern notions of race. Her future work will include further investigation of the interaction of conceptions of race, empire and science in relation to endangered peoples, with a particular focus issues of genocide, humanitarianism and modern settler colonial societies in Africa, North America and Oceania.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/history/qureshi-sadiah.aspx
Dr Sujit Sivasundaram
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Sujit Sivasundaram is an outstanding scholar of remarkable creativity, productivity, and novelty. His research spans a considerable range of connected but also distinct sub-disciplines: the history of empire, knowledge, religion, science, medicine, and the environment. He joins a recent intellectual movement which maps imperialism through examining colonies as laboratories for scientific discovery. In doing so, he makes links with indigenous science, and construes empire partly in terms of mastery of environments as well as of peoples. Dr Sivasundaram’s first book, Nature and the Godly Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) was the first account of the relationship between nineteenth-century science and Christianity in the non-Western world, and has recently been issued in paperback. His forthcoming work, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (University of Chicago Press, 2013) opens up a new perspective on the history of empire by focussing on oceans, islands, and coastlands.
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/sps20@cam.ac.uk
Dr David Todd
Department of History, King’s College London
Dr David Todd has made fundamental contributions to two areas of historical enquiry: the history of economic thought and French imperial history. In his Identité Économique de la France, and a series of important essays on the history of political economy, he shows how economic ideas were translated, resisted, and indigenised as they moved across the nineteenth-century world. He argues, in particular, that in France, unlike in Britain, economic and political liberalism were at odds, and the response to Smith and Ricardo was conditioned by local politics, by the persistence of early modern forms of mercantilist ideology, and by France's predicament as a latecomer to the industrial revolution. Todd is at work now on a second major book on the structure of French imperialism between the collapse of Napoleon and the Third Republic, from which he has already published influential synoptic essays and an article on fiscal policy in colonial Algeria. Writing extensively in both English and French, Todd is emerging as an important bridge between the historical worlds of Britain and France.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/history/people/staff/academic/todd/i...
Dr Emma Bunce
University of Leicester
Planetary magnetospheres and auroral emissions
Dr Andrew Levan
University of Warwick
Gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and high redshift galaxies
Dr Richard Massey
University of Edinburgh
Understanding the nature of dark matter and dark energy
Dr David Pontin
University of Dundee
Modelling the structure and dynamics of magnetic fields in astrophysical plasmas
Dr David Seery
University of Sussex
Cosmology and the very early universe
Professor Michael Elsby
University of Edinburgh
Labour economics, macroeconomics, unemployment and wage setting
Professor Andrea Galeotti
University of Essex
The study of social and economic networks
Dr Sophocles Mavroeidis
University of Oxford
Econometrics and empirical macroeconomics
Dr Helen Simpson
University of Bristol
Empirical analysis of firm location decisions, productivity and innovation
Dr Paul Surico
London Business School
Macroeconomics, business cycle, monetary economics and applied econometrics
Dr Maria Ana Cataluna
University of Dundee
Photonics
Dr Simon Cotton
Queen’s University Belfast
Wireless communications
Dr Antonio Gil
Swansea University
Computational modelling
Dr Katsuichiro Goda
Bristol University
Earthquake engineering; risk and reliability analysis; and engineering seismology
Dr Karen Johnson
Durham University
Community-led regeneration of brownfield land using sustainable technologies
Dr Peter Adey
Royal Holloway, University of London
Cultural and political geography; security; and new mobilities paradigm
Dr Siwan Davies
Swansea University
Environmental change and quaternary science
Dr Hayley Fowler
Newcastle University
Climate change impacts on water resource system extremes of floods and drought
Dr Simon L Lewis
University College London
Tropical global change science
Dr Simon Reid-Henry
Queen Mary, University of London
The geographies of science; development and security; geopolitics; geographical theory
Dr Anthony Bale
Birkbeck, University of London
Middle English literature and late medieval culture
Dr Lindiwe Dovey
SOAS,University of London
African and postcolonial film and literature
Dr Kirsty Hooper
University of Liverpool
Spanish and Galician studies
Dr Ben Hutchinson
University of Kent
20th century German poetry, prose, and theory
Dr Robert Macfarlane
University of Cambridge
English literature, landscape and environment
Dr Ed Bennett
Birmingham Conservatoire
Music composition
Dr Helen Freshwater
Newcastle University
Contemporary British theatre and performance
Ms Esther Johnson
Sheffield Hallam University
Filmmaking; photography and curating
Ms Phoebe Unwin
University College London
Contemporary visual art: the exploration of feelings and forms through painting
Ms Emily Wardill
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
Film and video
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Dr Emma Bunce
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester
Emma Bunce is an internationally acclaimed expert on planetary aurorae; that is, the equivalent of the Earth's “Northern Lights” at other planets, notably Jupiter and Saturn. The basic mechanism for generating these spectacular displays can be understood in terms of the bombardment of the upper atmosphere by energetic charged particles, which excite neutral atoms in much the same way that a neon light glows. Dr Bunce's work on the aurorae at Jupiter revealed that aurorae there are much more rigidly controlled by characteristics of the planet than at Earth. More recently, Dr Bunce combined direct measurements of the particles and fields by the Cassini spacecraft with detailed images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to develop a theoretical model for auroral displays at Saturn that resembles the Earth's configuration more than that at Jupiter, but with additional contributions from the far more dynamic outer magnetised atmosphere. Dr Bunce has won a number of prizes for her work, serves on national and international panels, and is one of the leaders developing the next major mission to Jupiter and its moons.
Dr Andrew Levan
Department of Physics, University of Warwick
Andrew Levan is a world leader in the observational study of gamma-ray bursts. These are the largest explosions in the Universe, briefly rivalling the combined luminous output of all its other constituents. Andrew has led much of the work on these objects, which appear to divide mostly into two types: the collapse of a massive spinning star to a black hole, or the coalescence of a neutron star with a second neutron star or a black hole. Very recently he has led work suggesting a third type, in which a star is torn apart by a supermassive black hole in the centre of a distant galaxy.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/astro/people/levan/
Dr Richard Massey
Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh
Richard Massey is mapping out the invisible landscape of dark matter which dominates the matter contribution to the Universe and controls the formation of galaxies. Dark matter is heavy, and so gravitationally influences the ordinary atoms that make up planets, stars and galaxies. However, it does not shine, so it can be seen only indirectly. Dr Massey has used the Hubble Space Telescope to watch dark matter deflect passing rays of light from distant galaxies: revealing the largest ever dark matter map in 3-D, and watching how it behaves during collisions of galaxy clusters. Dr Massey has also helped to extend the Hubble Space Telescope's working life by developing a method to correct radiation damage to its sensitive electronics. He is currently building a new telescope that will float to a similar vantage point at the top of the Earth's atmosphere, via a high altitude balloon.
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~rjm/
Dr David Pontin
Division of Mathematics, University of Dundee
David Pontin is one of the world's experts on developing theoretical models for the way that magnetic fields interact with ionised gas, especially in the atmosphere of the Sun. If you heat any gas enough it becomes ionised, such as in a candle flame or a fluorescent light tube, and it behaves so differently from a normal gas that we give it a new name, "plasma", the fourth state of matter in addition to solids, liquids and gases. Most of the universe, including the ionosphere of the Earth and the whole of the Sun is in this plasma state. The main way in which plasma behaves differently from normal gas is that it interacts in complex and subtle ways with any magnetic field that is present. This interaction is responsible for many of the dynamic processes that we observe in the Universe, such as solar flares. The particular aspect of the interaction on which David Pontin is doing pioneering and world-leading work is to describe how the magnetic fields can break and re-connect and in the process heat and accelerate the plasma to very high energies.
http://www.maths.dundee.ac.uk/~dpontin/index.html
Dr David Seery
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sussex
David Seery is a theoretical cosmologist whose work combines high-level technical ability with deep physical insight. He is a recognised world expert in the subject of cosmic non-gaussianity, which seeks to fully quantify the statistical properties of the large-scale Universe, his work being distinguished by his mastery of both the quantum mechanical and relativistic aspects of the topic. His highly-cited early papers on non-gaussianity from cosmic inflation models are seminal and initiated the field of systematic study of non-gaussianities from inflation. More recently he has contributed innovative new techniques which allow accurate numerical computation of the dynamical evolution of non-gaussianities. This work is of direct relevance to major ongoing projects, including the European Space Agency's Planck Satellite which will report its first cosmological results in early 2013.
Economics
Professor Michael Elsby
School of Economics, University of Edinburgh
Mike Elsby's research focuses on the interface between macroeconomics and labour economics, with a particular emphasis on developing a better understanding of high and volatile unemployment rates in developed economies from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. His recent work has examined the measurement of labour market flows over the business cycle and across firms, the economics of labour market adjustment costs, the role of trend wage growth on long-term increases in joblessness, and the aggregate labour market effects of downward rigidity in wages. His research is characterised by elegant and insightful theoretical models coupled with careful and detailed analysis of the data. He has already made a number of important contributions, providing a much richer and more comprehensive understanding of unemployment transitions and wage growth, and he has established himself as a leading expert in the theory and empirics of unemployment both in the US and the UK, as well as in other OECD countries.
http://sites.google.com/site/mikeelsby/
Professor Andrea Galeotti
Department of Economics, University of Essex
Andrea Galeotti has established himself as a worldwide leader in the relatively new field of network economics. Traditionally, economic models disregarded the details of how and why agents (consumers, firms, or other strategic actors such as politicians) associated themselves with each other. Network economics analyses both, how and why economic agents choose to interact with each other, and the consequences of the fine details of who knows whom and who deals with whom --- the network structure. Andrea Galeotti has made several important contributions to this new field. For example, he has made significant advances in our understanding of why and how some (few) people become influential, shaping the views of many. He has investigated how firms can optimally try to influence the influential in order to increase their sales. And he has analysed the important interplay of information exchange between voters and the disclosure choice made by politicians. His work shows great technical skill and deep insights into relevant problems.
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~agaleo/
Dr Sophocles Mavroeidis
Department of Economics, University of Oxford
Sophocles Mavreoidis works on the interface of econometrics and macroeconomics. His research has focussed on the practical issues that arise in analysing and drawing inferences from economic data. As such it has had a substantial impact on both academics and policy makers. For example, two of his early publications were on the pitfalls that can arise when traditional econometric methods are used to estimate equations designed to capture the trade-off between output and inflation. More recently he has turned his attention to the statistical issues involved in estimating the models of the economy that are currently used by many central banks.
https://sites.google.com/site/sophoclesmavroeidis/
Dr Helen Simpson
Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol
Dr Helen Simpson is a leading expert in the economics of firm location. Her work to date has examined the links between firms and universities and the importance of geographical co-location, whether providing employers with incentives to train low skilled workers brings benefits, the role of competition in the product market on innovation and productivity growth and how regional wage variation affects the decision of industry to locate. All these issues are crucial for knowing whether the millions spent by government on regional investment funds and subsidies to firms are good investments or simply a waste of tax payers’ money. Dr Simpson’s research in these fields is cutting edge and innovative, exploiting new sources of data and working with a range of other academics to provide new insights on old puzzles. She is also actively sought out by governments and policy makers for her knowledge and advice.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/people/researchers/simpson/
Dr Paul Surico
Department of Economics, London Business School
Dr Surico has a hugely impressive research portfolio examining the nature and causes of variations in macroeconomic activity. Such variations are often referred to as the business cycle, and Dr Surico’s research focuses particularly on the effects of policy actions on the business cycle. His research shows a deep understanding of modern macroeconomic theory, while employing cutting edge statistical/econometric techniques to provide innovative empirical analyses of important issues. Influenced partly by a period working at the Bank of England, many of Dr Surico’s publications are concerned with the effects of monetary policy. In addition, he has made important contributions to empirical modelling in contexts where responses to policy very over sectors or individuals, and also where the nature of responses may change over time. There is every indication that his future work will continue to enhance our understanding of the complex macroeconomy.
http://www.london.edu/facultyandresearch/faculty/search.do?uid=psurico
https://sites.google.com/site/paolosurico/
Engineering
Dr Maria Ana Cataluna
School of Engineering, University of Dundee
Maria Ana Cataluna is one of the world's leading young engineers in the area of ultrafast photonics. She has pioneered important developments in the use of novel nanomaterials (quantum dots) leading to the demonstration of a new generation of extremely compact, low-cost and high-performance ultrafast lasers, only a few millimetres in length, by harnessing the discrete nature of the energy levels in quantum dots as an extra degree of freedom. Her research has shown major advantages and new functionalities of this technology, with a wide range of applications ranging from optical telecommunications to biomedical imaging
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/elecengphysics/staff/mariaanacataluna/
Dr Simon Cotton
Institute of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast
Simon Cotton has gained an international reputation for his work on body-centric communications, which is presently one of the most rapidly-evolving areas of wireless communications. His work is focused on understanding how wireless signals propagate around the human body, from the body to nearby wireless infrastructure, and also from person to person. Using both advanced modelling and experimental measurements he has been able to characterise this form of propagation, and devised wearable communications systems which will lead to applications as diverse as telemedicine, precision athlete monitoring and new social networking experiences.
http://www.ee.qub.ac.uk/wireless/
Dr Antonio Gil
School of Engineering, Swansea University
Antonio Gil is distinguished for his pioneering work in computational mechanics, a branch of engineering concerned with modelling the behaviour of structures under load using computer methods. He has devised entirely new methodologies which provide important tools to model, understand and predict the behaviour of structures from the nano-scale through to macroscopic scales. While his key contributions are in fundamental engineering science, his work has a very broad range of applications in areas of societal benefit such as the design of heart valves and prosthetics. Work at the nano-scale is centred on modelling the behaviour of grapheme sheets, a new and poorly understood material which promises transformative engineering applications. At larger scales, Dr Gil’s work on the interaction of fluids with membranes has seen application in modelling cardiovascular heart valves and offers the prospect of exploitation as an efficient tool for clinical diagnostics and planning surgical interventions. Dr Gil’s work is an outstanding example of innovative fundamental, but highly applicable, engineering research.
http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/engineering/gilantonio/
Dr Katsuichiro Goda
Faculty of Engineering, Bristol University
Katsuichiro Goda’s research is focused on catastrophic earthquake risk management from both economic and societal viewpoints. He has made breakthrough achievements by developing spatial correlations models of peak ground motions for different sites which have enabled seismic loss estimation of spatially distributed buildings and infrastructure. He was recently selected as a member for the UK-based Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) mission for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. In the next few years, Goda plans to concentrate on two major research topics: Infrastructure risk management subjected to multi-hazards, such as earthquakes and deterioration; and Seismic hazard/risk assessment of great subduction earthquakes. Dr Goda’s research is characterised by his original and ground-breaking approach to earthquake engineering responses at a systems level and its social relevance to vulnerable infrastructure at risk from seismic risks.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/civilengineering/person/katsu.goda.html
Dr Karen Johnson
School of Engineering, Durham University
Karen Johnson works in the field of sustainable engineering hydro-geo-chemistry, looking at innovative ways to reclaim wasteland and improve soil health using sustainable remediation technologies. Her research involves many disciplines, leading to collaborations with physicists, engineers, chemists, biologists and importantly but unusually in addition social scientists. She and her collaborators have for instance identified significant health inequality around low quality land such as brownfield and community mental health. Karen has had excellent and sustained success in securing competitive grant funding from EPSRC and industry and stands out as one of the top engineering scientists of her generation to demonstrate impact of their research at a relatively early stage of their careers.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/ecs/profiles/?id=2208/
Geography
Dr Peter Adey
School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, Keele University
Adey has established himself as a leading figure in the growing field of mobility studies within human geography, most notably through his monograph ‘Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects’ (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He has pioneered studies that address the relationship between space, security and mobility, working across the sub-disciplinary divisions of cultural, political and transport geography. He has also brought his research strengths to bear on the field of resilience and had a public impact on emergency planning through his work with the National Archives public workshops. His growing international research reputation is testament to the significance of his work and places him at the cutting edge of mobility and security debates. His proposed work on evacuation politics aims to pull together his research interests in a timely and engaging manner that will be of relevance across the social sciences.
http://www.keele.ac.uk/gge/people/adey/
Dr Siwan Davies
School of Environment and Society, Swansea University
Siwan Davies has gained an international reputation for dating rapid climate changes over past 150,000 years using micro-tephra in sediments and ice cores. She has organised tephra records into internationally accepted chronological frameworks across ice cores, especially from Greenland, and marine sediments. The work opens up exciting new possibilities for examining seemingly intractable problems, like quantifying the leads and lags in the climate system. She is President of an INQUA focus group and her research has recently been rewarded with a European Research Council grant. She plans to build a research team that can integrate ice core and marine sediment records.
http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/environmentsociety/geography/davies...
Dr Hayley Fowler
School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University
Hayley Fowler is internationally recognised for her outstanding achievements and substantial body of work on climate change, most notably predicting the extremes of precipitation and their impacts on water resource systems. She is widely known for her contribution to UK climate forecasts through her work on the ‘weather generator’ which was used by DeFRA to provide daily climate change information in their 2009 UK Climate Projections. Her scientific contributions are much wider as she researches at the interface of climatology and hydrology which provides for a holistic approach to water resource impacts and leads to work that has direct policy implications hence funding from DeFRA, the Environment Agency as well as the EU and UKRCs. Another key contribution has been on downscaling techniques to augment regional climate change predictions and provide local hydrological scenarios. Probabilistic modelling research has been coupled to hydrological impacts analysis including the extremes of flood risk and drought. In effect she has been able to bridge the gap between climate modellers and users of climate change information generated from climate models.
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/h.j.fowler/index.htm
Dr Simon L Lewis
School of Geography, University of Leeds
Simon Lewis conducts research to understand the structure and function of tropical forests, especially with regards their role in the global carbon budget. He has gained an international reputation for testing significant hypotheses using different lines of evidence from Africa and Amazonia, including long-term inventory plots. He calculated the effects of drought on Amazonian forest carbon budgets and showed that carbon storage in African forests was increasing. He has organised the only ground-based forest monitoring network in Africa and currently holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He plans to expand the African network, improve the forest database, provide new carbon balance estimates to the IPCC, and investigate future changes in forest biodiversity.
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/s.lewis/
Dr Simon Reid-Henry
School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Simon Reid-Henry has a surprisingly broad repertoire for a young academic, having undertaken important research on topics ranging from contemporary geopolitics, to economic geography, to the geography of science and development – across to the politics of revolutions. He has also carried out important internationally relevant work disputing the legal arguments for detention at Guantanamo Bay. This research invariably combines history with geography. He has a successful track record of book publication, is a regular and incisive contributor to national and international debates, and he has written for a broad public audience as well as academic specialists. He is a Geographer and writer more widely, of both outstanding potential and demonstrable achievement.
http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/reidhenrys.html
Modern European Languages and Literature
Dr Anthony Bale
Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Anthony Bale has written copiously on Medieval English literary and religious culture. In his first monograph, which received two prizes, he revealed the dynamics of anti-Semitism in England between 1350 and 1500 across a whole range of texts, institutions, and devotional practices. In the second, he analysed the aesthetic function of images of violence perpetrated by Jews, highlighting the centrality of pain and persecution in both Christian and Jewish religious culture. His multi-faceted study of anti-Semitism resists easy generalisations and probes the aesthetic and emotive component of anti-Semitic imagery. In addition to a generous series of articles, he has published two edited volumes and is completing a new scholarly translation of Mandeville’s Book of Travels. He is currently engaged in an analysis of the imaginary re-fashioning of the Calvary in post-Crusade Jerusalem, which promises to shed fascinating light on the way Western countries have shaped the Holy Land, with lasting consequences that continue to affect interactions between faith communities in the present.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/bale
Dr Lindiwe Dovey
Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, SOAS, University of London
Lindiwe Dovey has been awarded a prize for the breadth and acuity of her comparative research into African postcolonial audiovisual adaptation. She focuses upon adaptation from francophone and Anglophone literary and non-literary sources (including theatre, opera and dance) into a range of audiovisual media (film, television series and screen installations) as a powerful global process of rehistoricisation of cultural heritage. Her 2009 monograph African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen explored adaptation as a vehicle of the critque of contemporary violence in two of the major spheres of current African film-making, francophone West Africa and post-apartheid South Africa; ongoing and future work will expand this focus geographically into new African contexts and beyond. A significant strand of Dr Dovey’s work to date has been empirical: interchange with African film directors, an interest in the public reception of audiovisual adaptations and her own close involvement in the organisation and programming of African film festivals. One of her most striking research priorities is the promotion of serious scholarship on the centrality of film festivals to the birth and conceptualisation of African cinema.
http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff36139.php
Dr Kirsty Hooper
School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies, University of Liverpool
Kirsty Hooper works at the interface between three key fields in Hispanic Studies: women’s and gender studies, Galician studies, and studies of the construction of Spanish national identity. She is engaged in the transnational study of minorities, most significantly with a focus on the culture and literature of Galicia in north-west Spain. Her two monographs, one on Sofia Casanova, a Galician expatriate who lived in Poland and Russia, and the other on cultural relations and the Anglophone world, have made serious contributions to this emerging research area. Her current projects – a volume on Galicia in the British popular imagination and a counterpart volume on the British imagination of Spain’s plural cultures – mark a broadening of interest, and maintain her commitment to transnational studies. She is energetic and productive, notable for breadth, rigour and theoretical sophistication. She has a prodigious output for one so young, with an extraordinary capacity for initiative, and is already a well-known international figure, central to the networking research relations between Spain, the UK and the US.
http://www.kirstyhooper.net/
Dr Ben Hutchinson
School of European Cultures and Languages, University of Kent
Ben Hutchinson has published widely on German, French and English literature. His first book, Rilke’s Poetics of Becoming (2006), looked closely at the grammar and syntax of Rilke’s early poetry to show how its thematic concerns were expressed through stylistic details. This concern with style continued in his second book, written in German during his tenure of a Humboldt Fellowship at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv at Marbach, W.G. Sebald: Die dialektische Imagination (2009), based also on examining Sebald’s personal library and his marginalia. His recent Modernism and Style (2011) relates the concept and practice of literary style in Anglo-America, French and German modernism to impulses from philosophy (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). Besides publishing widely, he is active in organising international conferences, and has helped powerfully to energize a strong team of mostly young scholars in comparative literature in Kent.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/german/staff/hutchinson.html
Dr Robert Macfarlane
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Robert Macfarlane is the author of a wide-ranging scholarly study of the relationship between originality and plagiarism in the nineteenth century: it demonstrates that modern ideas of a sharp opposition between creation and borrowing cannot usefully be applied to authors such as George Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Whilst completing this work, he also published Mountains of the Mind, a highly unusual mix of cultural history (asking why people love mountaineering and when did the obsession emerge?) with biography (notably of George Mallory) and with personal passion. Praised by critics as ‘elegant’, ‘magnificent’ and, perhaps most relevant to the remit of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, ‘genre-busting’, it won three of Britain's most prestigious literary prizes: Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Macfarlane's third book, The Wild Place continued in the same vein, as the author recorded his quest to find the last forms of wilderness in the ‘denatured’ archipelago of the British Isles. Robert Macfarlane is the most eloquent of the young voices that are enabling literary study to make a contribution to our urgent modern debates about environmental crisis.
http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/teaching/fellows/display/?fellow=172
Performing and Visual Arts
Dr Ed Bennett
Composition Department, Birmingham Conservatoire
Ed Bennett is a leading young composer, whose work has been commissioned and performed by a wide range of major artists and ensembles, including the BBC Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Ulster Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and Sound Intermedia, Fidelio Trio and Berlin Percussion Ensemble. His music explores three main areas of creative innovation: the integration of live interactive electronics with amplified instruments, improvisation (including his ongoing collaboration with saxophonist Paul Dunmall), and multi-disciplinary work with several distinguished choreographers and visual artists, including Marcel Dzama, Juneau Projects and Ann Van den Broek. He also leads his own performing ensemble Decibel which he uses as a medium for exploring and developing new work.
http://www.edbennett.co.uk/
Dr Helen Freshwater
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University
Helen Freshwater is one of the most dynamic and thoughtful of the new generation of UK dramaturgs. Dramaturgy as a nominated field of study is still relatively young in the UK; at its best it provides a vibrant interchange between professional practice and academic study and it is in precisely this cross-over that Dr Freshwater stands alone. There are almost no theatre academics in the UK who can claim that one of their publications has shaped an award-winning play, and very few rehearsal room dramaturgs with Dr Freshwater’s academic credentials. Her proposed research project, combining as it does an exploration of the cultural context of childhood on stage with an examination of the actual practice of the employment of child performers in commercial theatre, epitomises this synthesis of the contextual with the practical, which is dramaturgy at its most valuable
Ms Esther Johnson
Media Arts, Sheffield Hallam University
Esther Johnson is a filmmaker and photographer whose works discover unexpected, emotionally resonant stories in the ordinary, the neglected and the forgotten. In this way her films and photographs quietly celebrate eccentric and marginal figures – like obsessive wireless radio collector Gerald Wells, the subject of her 2010 film Analogue Kingdom. Central to her films is a keen attention to the visual, and especially sonic, texture of objects, places and people (an interest also given expression in Ms Johnson’s audio works for radio and gallery spaces). Through this combination of precisely rendered details and evocative stories, Johnson creates films that are once densely poetic and remarkably accessible. Her work has been exhibited and recognized by a wide range of international festivals and museums, including Tate Modern, the London Film Festival, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.
http://www.blanchepictures.com/
Ms Phoebe Unwin
The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Phoebe Unwin has gained a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Award due to the clarity of vision which is expressed through her work in paint. She has gained wide international recognition at a precocious age and substantial esteem from her peers. Recently, she became an active member of a research-intensive department at a prominent art school. Her existing work as a painter is already sought after by public and private collections internationally. Her worthiness of an award was further enhanced by her potential to become a truly significant voice in the future of British painting.
Ms Emily Wardill
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Emily Wardill is a remarkable filmmaker and visual artist whose work is the product of intensive and rigorous research. Emily’s work addresses pivotal issues of our time, in particular through its investigations of cognitive science, language, representation and politics. Her research looks at the relationship between ideas and their materialisation and her work has had an impressive impact, with numerous high-profile exhibitions of her work in film. Emily plans to use the prize funds to contribute to the production of a new film work, enhancing the thematic strands of her work to date.
Dr Arwen Deuss
University of Cambridge
Geophysics and seismology
Dr Daniel Lunt
University of Bristol
Palaeoclimate modelling
Dr Tamsin Mather
University of Oxford
Volcanology
Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato
University of Southampton
Physical oceanography
Dr Nicholas Teanby
University of Bristol
Planetary atmospheres
Dr Patricia Allmer
Manchester Metropolitan University
Surrealism
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier
University of Nottingham
African American art
Dr Grace Brockington
University of Bristol
Art in Britain
Dr Alain George
University of Edinburgh
Islamic art
Dr Tara Hamling
University of Birmingham
British art
Dr Sylvie Delacroix
University College London
Jurisprudence
Mr Ben McFarlane
University of Oxford
Property law and trusts
Professor Vanessa Munro
University of Nottingham
Socio-legal studies / feminist legal theory
Professor Mathias Siems
University of East Anglia
Comparative law
Dr Ralph Wilde
University College London
International law
Dr Caucher Birkar
University of Cambridge
Pure mathematics (algebraic geometry)
Dr Timothy Browning
University of Bristol
Number theory
Dr Tom Coates
Imperial College London
Pure mathematics
Dr Radek Erban
University of Oxford
Applied mathematics
Dr Nicolai Meinshausen
University of Oxford
Statistics
Dr Angus Gowland
University College London
Intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe
Dr Julia Lovell
Birkbeck, University of London
Modern Chinese history
Dr Giorgio Riello
University of Warwick
Global history
Dr Alice Rio
King’s College London
Medieval history
Dr Alan Strathern
University of Cambridge
World history
Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Dr Arwen Deuss
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Dr Arwen Deuss is already recognised as one of the international stars of her generation in the subject of seismology – the study of the structure of the Earth gleaned from its response to earthquakes and large underground explosions. As an undergraduate she was the first to determine from seismological data that shear waves (for which the direction of motion of the elastic solid is perpendicular to the motion of the wave) were transmitted through the Earth’s solid inner core, of radius 1221 km, believed to consist of almost pure iron. Dr Deuss has gone on to work on the structure of the inner core, showing recently that it can be considered at four different segments, akin to a four-slice orange for example. Each segment has different iron crystal structure and anisotropy, related to the deduced strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the boundary between the liquid outer core and the solid mantle at a radius of approximately 3500 km (i.e. a depth of approximately 2900 km from the surface of the Earth). Dr Deuss has also used seismological techniques to analyse heterogeneity in the Earth’s mantle, linking these with descriptions in terms of mineral physics.
http://bullard.esc.cam.ac.uk/~deuss/
Dr Daniel Lunt
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Dan Lunt uses high-performance computer modelling to understand the processes involved in past climate change. Collating geological data to build hypotheses, which models can be used to test, he is able to add important quantification to the results of fieldwork from numerous sources. His work has highlighted the impact vegetation has made on the development of Pliocene ice sheets and the likely influence it will have on future climates. His model results also provide crucial information on the potential risks associated with proposals to ‘geoengineer’ Earth’s climate, i.e. deliberately manipulating the Earth’s climate to counteract the effects of global warming. He has pioneered new studies in this controversial area, showing the considerable problems with some of the proposed schemes. Dr Lunt has published in the world’s leading scientific literature, and his findings have made fundamental contributions across a range of different subject areas.
http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/staff/staff_lunt.html
Dr Tamsin Mather
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Tamsin Mather is a leading young scientist whose work is having a wide impact on the volcanological community. She studies the gases emitted by volcanoes, their chemical composition and interactions in the volcanic plume as well as wider issues such as environmental and health impacts, and the role of volcanic plume gases in the evolution of the atmosphere. She pioneered the concept of ‘reaction crucibles’ recognising that mixing air with volcanic gases catalyses atmospheric processes leading to the formation of unexpected chemical compounds in the plume with important chemical and environmental consequences. She is active in both public outreach and policy and has received a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and the UNESCO/L’Oreal UK and Ireland Women in Science Award.
http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~tamsinm
Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato
School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, University of Southampton
Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato is a physical oceanographer who specialises in the Southern Ocean and he has made several fundamental contributions to its study. His chosen region is one of the most important and least understood parts of the ocean for the global climate: for example, it is the place where much of the deep water in the world ocean is formed, and it plays a critical role in the oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Dr Naveira Garabato has used new observational techniques to show that vertical mixing is intense in regions of the Southern Ocean where there are seabed mountain ranges, to describe the circulation there, and to study its influence both on plankton and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Oceanography is ‘big science’ that requires highly organised collaboration among scientists, and he has in recent years become a leader of the ocean science community, spearheading major international shipboard expeditions and experiments that are helping to define our understanding of this remote and fascinating ocean.
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/soes/staff/acng/
Dr Nicholas Teanby
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Dr Nicholas Teanby has made significant advances in three very different fields. He compiled a remarkable history of the Earth’s magnetic field over the last 50,000 years from a drill hole into the lavas of a Hawaiian volcano, showing how the Earth’s field oscillated before it temporarily reversed direction. He then developed an automatic method to use minute earthquakes in a subterranean oil reservoir to document the changing stresses as the oil was extracted. This method has been applied to earthquakes beneath volcanoes and below oceanic trenches. More recently he has been interpreting the results from the Cassini space mission to Saturn and its moons. He has been able to discover the detailed structure of the atmosphere of the moon Titan, and how it changes during the Titan year that lasts for 29 Earth years. He is currently involved in the development of a broadband microseismometer for application to Solar System bodies, such as Mars and the Moon, and he plans to continue to work in the area of planetary seismology and atmospheres.
http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/people/teanby.html
History of Art
Dr Patricia Allmer
Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr Patricia Allmer’s research in the comparatively under-explored areas of Belgian Surrealism, the second largest national concentration of the movement, and women artists and Surrealism, is transformational. In 2009 major outcomes of her research came into the public domain; her monograph, Rene Magritte – Beyond Painting (MUP) focusing upon philosophical implications and other neglected and marginalised aspects of his works, redefined his artistic practice. Her curation of the exhibition Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery introduced over 60,000 visitors to the work of three generations of artists from the US, UK, Mexico, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The exhibition and its accompanying edited catalogue challenged the existing canon and received widespread critical acclaim. Her current project Lee Miller: Beyond Frontiers questions national, gender and artistic boundaries and will focus on her war, fashion and Surrealist photography, as well as her collaborations with other women Surrealists.
http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/profile/pallmer
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier
School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier’s outstanding work in the field of African American art is both original and transformative. Her recent publications include African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present which traces artistic and political developments over a two hundred year period by examining daguerreotypes, photographs, paintings, ceramics, quilts, sculpture and murals. Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery (co-edited with Judie Newman) gathers together scholars, museum and gallery curators and public historians to address major issues regarding memorialising, representing and narrating histories of slavery in the public domain. While Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination provides the first interdisciplinary study of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century mixed-media representations of black heroism. A future project will be a critical edition of Horace Pippin’s war diaries and letters, and this will add considerably to our understanding of this most important American visual artist. .
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/american/people/celeste-marie.bernier
Dr Grace Brockington
Department of History of Art, University of Bristol
Dr Grace Brockington has an impressive record of academic achievement. She has published articles where she shed new light on the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group and portrayed the Omega workshops as ideologically sustained by war through the determination to remain creative, despite the terrible destruction of war. In 2009 she contributed an important essay in the groundbreaking catalogue for the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury; Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913 - 19 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, entitled The Omega and the End of Civilization: Pacifism, Publishing and Performance in the First World War. She was also sole editor of a key collection of essays entitled Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fine de Siècle, also published last year. Her monograph Above the Battlefield: British Modernism and the Peace Movement, 1900 – 1918 was a radical revision of the relationship between modernism and the peace movement drawing upon new archival research and based upon her doctoral thesis. She is already engaged in an exciting new project revaluating the 'experimental' work of Vanessa Bell which will result in the co-curation of an exhibition (with Barnaby Wright) at the Courtauld Gallery planned for 2014.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arthistory/staff/brockington.html
Dr Alain George
History of Art, University of Edinburgh
Dr Alain George’s publications over the past three years have offered remarkable new insights into the field of Islamic art. His discussion of the calligraphy and design of early manuscripts of the Qur’an is conducted methodically, and with an eye that is invariably alert to the slightest detail. At the same time, each of these individual studies constitutes a highly imaginative exploration of the particular material, which may be appreciated by specialists and non-specialists alike. The extension of his research into performance studies, with reference to Arabic illustrated books, is another testimony to his liveliness and originality. Results from his current work on the social and intellectual context for the building of the Great Mosque of Damascus will be eagerly awaited, not least since he intends to show how the emerging civilisation of Islam was closely intertwined with the world of late Antiquity. The breadth of his scholarship is also demonstrated by another new project on the artistic exchange between Islam and China in the 8th and 9th centuries, adding further to our understanding of how Islamic art is at the crossroads of world culture.
www.ed.ac.uk/ace/history-art/staff/alain-george
Dr Tara Hamling
Department of History, University of Birmingham
One of the most familiar stories in the history of British art has been about the disastrous impact of the Reformation, resulting in the destruction of church art in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries. Generations of art historians, critics and more recently even television presenters have presented these long drawn-out historical changes as a disaster for the visual arts, strangling the Renaissance at birth, isolating England from continental sources of inspiration and setting back the development of refined taste. Without denying the impact of the Reformation on a number of important traditional forms of visual art, Dr Hamling's work on the post-Reformation period radically revises this traditional view by showing how the aims and purposes of religious art were transferred from the more public spaces of the church to the more private spaces of the domestic sphere. The visual arts were not solely the business of aristocratic elites but also of the middle orders of the gentry. In her analysis of the location, form and subject-matter of visual signs found in figured plaster ceilings and overmantels, woodcuts in devotional books and embroidered into samplers and other textiles, Dr Hamling has shown how spiritual questions were explored for laypeople through what she calls ‘everyday objects’. Her work requires us to re-think ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as categories applied to the visual arts and to re-assess the significance of large numbers of fascinating, surviving works previously condemned merely as works of ‘applied’ or ‘decorative’ art. Her work is both radical and accessible.
http://www.shakespeare.bham.ac.uk/academic/tarahamling.shtml
Law
Dr Sylvie Delacroix
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Sylvie Delacroix is a legal philosopher who brings her deep understanding of the French and German traditions to bear on her engagement with Anglo-Saxon analytical jurisprudence. She has made an original and illuminating contribution to our understanding of law’s binding quality. It would be hard to over-estimate Dr Delacroix’s achievement in spanning philosophical methods which are almost always divided in contemporary legal theory, but her achievements are by no means limited to jurisprudence. Her interest in the ethics of risk led her to take a leading role in the establishment of the new Faculty Centre for Ethics and Law at UCL: an exceptional achievement. Her conviction that legal normativity is brought about on a daily basis through social interaction in particular contexts implies a commitment to bridging the gap between theory and practice. This is reflected in her current research on the values which underlie and animate the Palestinian constitution-making project.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/academics/profiles/index.shtml?delacroix
Mr Ben McFarlane
Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Ben McFarlane has taken a major step towards providing a unified conception of property law, bringing together rights in land, rights in things, equitable property rights and restitution within a single, theoretical framework and explaining their inter-relationships systematically. He is unusual in being a specialist in property law who deals with all kinds of rights in property and approaches the subject in a way that brings together theory, doctrine and practice. In his justly admired book The Structure of Property Law he explained how property law answers fundamental questions about the use and ownership of property. In a lucid, clear and analytically rigorous manner he reassessed the relationships between different kinds of rights in and relating to property and argued that equitable property rights can best be conceived as rights to be asserted against other, legal, rights in property. He tested his model by examining the reasoning of judges when deciding cases on property law. This gives his theory explanatory as well as normative power. Coupled with his accessible style, it allows him to influence judges, legal practitioners and students as well as policy-makers, law reformers and legal philosophers. He now aims to see whether it is possible to extend his ‘right against a right’ theory to other European systems of property law.
http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/profile/mcfarlaneb
Professor Vanessa Munro
School of Law, University of Nottingham
In the last ten years Professor Vanessa Munro has produced an impressive portfolio of publications which combine high quality scholarship with hard-hitting practical and policy impact. Her academic excellence is evidenced in an outstanding academic record, extraordinary success in securing external research funding, and a rich and prolific assortment of publications, including a monograph, three edited collections and a number of high impact journal articles. Professor Munro’s work is distinctive in that it deploys such a wide range of different research methods so effectively. She is as at home with qualitative empirical work as she is with legal doctrine and analysis and all of her work is strongly informed by socio-legal theoretical approaches. The substantive content of her scholarship – broadly in the field of criminal justice - also ranges to encompass rape law, the regulation of prostitution and human trafficking in which context her scholarship rightly transcends jurisdictional boundaries to embrace international perspectives and debates. Perhaps most widely acknowledged is the work she carried out examining jurors’ deliberative processes by means of mock jury techniques. Professor Munro is also one of a handful of scholars exploring the theoretical possibilities of a rehabilitated liberalism for feminist legal studies in the monograph, Law and Politics at the Perimeter: Re-Evaluating Key Debates in Feminist Legal Theory.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Law/Staff-Lookup/vanessa.munro
Professor Mathias Siems
The Law School, University of East Anglia
Professor Mathias Siems works mainly in the fields of comparative company and related commercial law and in law and economics. He has made an impressive and innovatory contribution to scholarship in these areas. His work has both advanced the theoretical understanding of comparative company law and played a pivotal role in developing systematic quantitative methodologies by which to measure the impact of the rules in different jurisdictions regarding aspects of corporate governance. His output is therefore at the cutting-edge of both theoretical and empirical research, and the work he does is of great value to scholars and policy-makers internationally in an area of global significance. In addition to this he has published original ideas on the methodology of legal research and the concept of ‘originality’ in such research, thereby contributing significantly to an increasingly urgent question for the academic legal community.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/law/msiems
Dr Ralph Wilde
Faculty of Laws, University College London
Dr Ralph Wilde is one of the leading younger scholars in international law in the UK today working in two key areas: the administration of territory by international organisations, and extraterritorial application of human rights law. His book entitled International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away, published by OUP has received widespread acclaim, winning, for example, the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law in 2009. This prestigious prize has only rarely been awarded to a British scholar. Dr Wilde has also embarked upon a monograph on the extraterritorial application of human rights law and has published some leading articles in this area, most notably in the Michigan Journal of International Law. In addition, he is working with Dame Rosalyn Higgins and others towards a monograph on the law of the UN for OUP. He is also playing an increasing important role in international law life in the UK and elsewhere, being appointed a member of the Executive Councils of both the American Society of International Law and the International Law Association.
www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/wilde
Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Caucher Birkar
Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge
Dr Caucher Birkar is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his outstanding contributions to fundamental research in algebraic geometry. His work on the Termination of Flips conjecture and the Log Minimal Model Programme has had great impact on the field. His best known work to date is published in a joint paper with Cascini, Hacon and McKernan which, in part, grew out of his independent investigations. It has attracted wide attention and admiration. It proves the main conjectures of the Minimal Model Programme in all dimensions and essentially implies a complete classification of algebraic varieties up to bi-rational equivalence. Results of such power had been regarded, for some time, as virtually out of reach. Their new-found accessibility has spawned a revival of interest in this classical area. While undoubtedly a break-through, this joint paper is only one step in a programme that Dr Birkar continues to pursue. In earlier work, he reduced the general Termination of Flips Conjecture to an apparently more accessible conjecture of Shokurov, so providing a way further forward into this subject. On the basis of these achievements, Dr Birkar already ranks with the world’s leaders in the field.
http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~cb496/
Dr Timothy Browning
School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
Dr Timothy Browning works at the interface of analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry; his primary focus is the distribution of rational points on varieties, a topic of central importance in mathematics. One famous open problem is Manin's conjecture, which predicts the density of rational points on algebraic varieties in terms of the geometry of the varieties in a deep and beautiful way. Dr Browning has introduced novel and powerful marriages of techniques from analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry; and in work both alone and jointly he has resolved Manin's conjecture for several families of varieties. He is already a leader internationally in the area which applies analytical methods to the investigation of rational points on higher dimensional values. His work takes known analytic methods beyond the boundary of what was previously possible, and opens uncharted territory.
http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~matdb/
Dr Tom Coates
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Dr Tom Coates has made outstanding contributions to enumerative algebraic geometry. His work lies in an area called Gromov-Witten theory (the science of counting holomorphic curves on algebraic and symplectic manifolds) that is an important and widely studied field on the boundary of mathematics and theoretical physics. On the one hand ideas from string theory are used to solve problems in geometry and topology while on the other hand the computations serve as tests for the physical theory by verifying the mathematical predictions in string theory. Dr Coates has changed the field of Gromov-Witten theory with the introduction of the Langrangian cone formalism (with Givental) and with his work on the Crepant Resolution Conjecture (in parts with others). The former has lead to a greater understanding of the mathematical physical theory of mirror symmetry while the latter greatly clarified the relationship between Gromov-Witten theory and the more classical theory of birational geometry. In addition to these far-reaching ideas, he has also provided some of the best and most difficult explicit computations in the field.
http://coates.ma.ic.ac.uk/
Dr Radek Erban
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Radek Erban is awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in Mathematical Biology. With his work on bacterial chemotaxis, Dr Erban has made major contributions towards the understanding of how cell-level decision making translates into population-level behaviour. He has understood how to incorporate cell-level behaviour in a function that characterises the macroscopic response and provided a set of techniques for tackling more general problems. In addition, with I. Kevrekidis, Dr Erban has developed computer-assisted methods for analysing stochastic models of gene regulatory networks, and has applied general multiscale equation-free methodology to them. Most recently, Radek’s papers have significantly clarified some fundamental issues concerning the stochastic analysis of reaction-diffusion systems. This work is having a large impact on the use of stochastic methods for modelling kinetics in biological applications. His future research will continue to focus on real world problems which offer mathematical challenges.
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/erban/
Dr Nicolai Meinshausen
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
Dr Nicolai Meinshausen has a growing international reputation as one of the leading mathematical statisticians of his generation. He is an outstanding scientist both in statistics and in climate research, highly original and with an impressive record of contributions. Over recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the amount of data now available in many scientific disciplines. The challenge is to determine the conditions under which it is possible to identify interesting information hidden in such data, and then to find statistical algorithms to do so. Dr Meinshausen’s research combines important theoretical results and computational implementation for high-dimensional situations. His work on variable selection with the Lasso has been particularly important. In other influential work he has shown the benefit of using resampling techniques in assessing the relevance of variables when the number of variables greatly exceeds the sample size, and addressed the problem of multiple testing when the number of hypotheses is vast (the original work was in an astronomical context but has been extended to other settings).
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~meinshau/
Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History
Dr Angus Gowland
Department of History, University College London
Dr Angus Gowland is the author of The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in context (2006), a brilliant and highly original first book. Its subject, Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) had previously been studied as a classic of English literature, while historians had neglected it. Dr Gowland’s achievement is, as the book’s sub-title implies, to replace Burton in his historical context or more exactly, contexts in the plural: not only seventeenth-century medicine, in which ‘melancholy’ was a technical term, but contemporary debates on religion and politics as well. Angus Gowland does not ignore the literary aspect of the Anatomy indeed, he has much of interest to say about its rhetoric. Trained as a historian, he shows a remarkable ability to acquire, internalise and use with great effectiveness a battery of techniques normally associated with literature. Since publishing this book, the author has begun to work on dream interpretation in the Renaissance: another area with rich interaction between philosophical, religious, medical and literary currents.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/about_us/academic_staff/dr_angus
Dr Julia Lovell
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Julia Lovell has conducted research in China in affiliation with both the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the History Department of Beijing University. The author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006) and The Great Wall: China against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000 (Grove Atlantic, 2006), Dr Lovell will be publishing a new study in 2011 of the Sino-British Opium War (1840-42), examining the conflict from both the Chinese and British sides. This will also consider the impact of the war on the subsequent 170 years of China’s relations with the West and uses a range of Chinese language sources little used in previous Western books. Dr Lovell is also a translator of distinction, whose work has attracted considerable attention. She is also a frequent contributor to the academic blog The China Beat (http://www.thechinabeat.org/), and also writes for the Guardian, Times, New Statesman, Prospect and Economist. Her next project focuses on the West’s enthusiasm for Maoism between the 1930s and 1970s, another facet of China’s relationship with the rest of the world.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/dr-julia...
Dr Giorgio Riello
Department of History, University of Warwick
Dr Giorgio Riello has published widely (in English, French, Italian and Russian) on topics that include cultural, economic and global history. He is a scholar of great distinction and breadth, whose key contributions have been in the field of the history of fashion and global history, particularly the history of commodities. His first academic monograph, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (OUP, 2006) was complemented by Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, co-authored with Peter McNeil. More recently, Dr Riello’s research has focused on the global history of textile production and trade. In addition to a succession of articles on this topic in peer-reviewed journals, he has co-edited The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850 (OUP, 2009) and How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Brill, 2009). His new project promises to place fashion, textiles and material culture within the framework of global history.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/griello/
Dr Alice Rio
Department of History, King’s College London
Dr Alice Rio's work makes a fundamental contribution to the understanding of early medieval society as well as to the practice of historical study of the early middle ages. She is outstandingly skilled in the analysis of difficult and ambiguous sources with subtle attention to fine detail and an ability to link that precision to larger problems in political, economic, and social history as well as the technical history of law and legal practice. Her monograph, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages (CUP, 2009) focuses on Merovingian and Carolingian legal formula collections and the light they throw on the lives of ordinary people. This won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize in 2010 for the best first book in any field apart from British history. This book also established the historical importance of these hitherto overlooked sources. She followed up this work with a splendid translation of the most important of these Latin formulary collections. Her current work on freedom and unfreedom has important implications for historians in many periods and parts of the world. It breaks new ground in the study of social practice and builds effectively on her familiarity with the legal sources. Alice Rio's quick, deep and subtle historical intelligence promises to transform larger debates about the transition from Roman to medieval European society as well as the medieval origins of political ideas and institutions of liberty and slavery.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/history/staff/academic/rio...
Dr Alan Strathern
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Dr Alan Strathern's oeuvre is centred on an investigation of the space between religion and politics in the early modern world. In Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka (CUP, 2007) and in a range of influential essays, he examines both how power sought to make itself sacred and how religious change, and in particular conversion, shape and were shaped by power, in particular by Portuguese maritime imperialism. He combines deep and profound work in Southeast Asia, anchored to its west on Sri Lanka, with broad interests which embrace three continents and four major religious traditions, and bring him into particular engagement with the histories of Hawaii, the kingdom of the Kongo, Japan and China. His work exemplifies at the highest level the empirical curiosity of the historian about the precise processes of change in each context, mustering significant linguistic, paleographical, and cultural skills. It is also powerfully comparative and interdisciplinary drawing, as in his exploration of the 'stranger-king' formation, on a range of literatures in anthropology, sociology, political science, political economy, and comparative religion. Dr Strathern is now engaged in completing a major study of how the idea of sacred kingship shaped the expansion of monotheism around the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/strathern.html
Dr Christopher Conselice
University of Nottingham
Galaxy formation and evolution
Dr Jim Hinton
University of Leeds
Gamma-ray astronomy
Dr Kazuya Koyama
University of Portsmouth
Cosmology
Dr Ross McLure
University of Edinburgh
Extragalactic astronomy
Dr Ineke de Moortel
University of St Andrews
Solar physics
Dr Hiranya Peiris
University College London
Cosmology
Dr Claire Adjiman
Imperial College London
Optimisation theories and algorithms and property prediction methods
Professor Mercedes Maroto-Valer
University of Nottingham
Energy technologies
Dr Eleanor Stride
University College London
Biomedical engineering
Dr Caroline Bressey
University College London
Historical and cultural geography
Dr Matt King
Newcastle University
Glaciology
Dr David Lambert
Royal Holloway, University of London
European imperialism and its legacies
Dr Stephen Legg
University of Nottingham
Interwar colonial India
Dr Chris Stokes
Durham University
Ice-sheet instability
Dr Laura Ashe
University of Oxford
English medieval literature
Dr Bettina Bildhauer
University of St Andrews
The German late Middle Ages and the way they are perceived in modernity
Dr Philip Bullock
University of Oxford
Russian literature, music and cultural history
Dr Santanu Das
Queen Mary, University of London
Early twentieth-century literature and culture in English literature
Professor Lisa Downing
University of Exeter
Nineteenth-century French culture, critical theory, and cinema studies
Dr Helena Sanson
University of Cambridge
The history of linguistic thought and women's history
Ms Nell Catchpole
Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Cross-arts collaboration and the creation of new music
Professor David Cotterrell
Sheffield Hallam University
Politicised and romantic themes through digital technologies
Dr Emma Hornby
University of Bristol
Medieval liturgical chant
Ms Daria Martin
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art
Film art
Dr Stephen Barker
Cardiff University
Palaeoceanography and palaeoclimatology
Dr Alan Haywood
University of Leeds
Palaeoclimatology
Dr Heiko Pälike
University of Southampton
Palaeoclimatology
Dr Paul Palmer
The University of Edinburgh
Climate change
Dr Rosalind Rickaby
University of Oxford
Palaeo-biogeochemistry
Professor Christian Turney
University of Exeter
Geochronology and palaeoclimate reconstruction
Dr Jill Burke
The University of Edinburgh
The visual arts and the construction of identity in renaissance Italy
Dr Natasha Eaton
University College London
Indian and British colonial art, 1700-2008
Dr Alexander Marr
University of St Andrews
Art and science in early modern Europe
Dr Carol Richardson
The Open University
Early modern art history
Dr Caroline Vout
University of Cambridge
Greco-Roman art and its reception
Dr Filippo de Vivo
University of London
Early modern European history, especially Italy and the republic of Venice
Dr Caroline Humfress
University of London
Early medieval history, legal history and the early Christian church
Dr Simon MacLean
University of St Andrews
Medieval European history (8th - 11th Centuries)
Dr Hannah Smith
University of Oxford
Early modern British history
Dr Paul Warde
University of East Anglia
The economic and environmental history of northern Europe
Dr William Whyte
University of Oxford
British architectural history
Dr Martin Hairer
The University of Warwick
Probability/analysis
Dr Harald Helfgott
University of Bristol
Number theory, diophantine geometry and group theory
Dr Jared Tanner
The University of Edinburgh
Numerical analysis
Professor Andreas Winter
University of Bristol
Quantum information
Professor Marianna Csornyei
University College London
Geometric measure theory
Dr William Hughes
University of Leeds
Evolutionary biology – entomology
Dr Kate E Jones
Zoological Society of London
Biodiversity science
Dr Andrea Manica
University of Cambridge
Population biology
Dr Tommaso Pizzari
University of Oxford
Evolutionary biology
Dr Jane Reid
University of Aberdeen
Population and evolutionary ecology