Grant listings

Dr Tom Geue
University of St Andrews

Dr Theodora Jim
University of Nottingham

Dr Giuseppe Pezzini
University of Oxford

Dr Henry Stead
University of St Andrews

Dr Kathryn Stevens
University of Oxford

Dr Nicolas Brantut
University College London

Dr Andrea Burke
University of St Andrews

Dr Paula Koelemeijer
Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr Erin Saupe
University of Oxford

Dr Nem Vaughan
University of East Anglia

Dr Jayne Birkby
University of Oxford

Dr Radha Boya
University of Manchester

Dr Denis Martynov
University of Birmingham

Dr Jonathan Matthews
University of Bristol

Dr Sam Stranks
University of Cambridge

Professor Teresa Bejan
University of Oxford

Dr Christopher Claassen
University of Glasgow

Dr Graham Denyer Willis
University of Cambridge

Dr Janina Dill
University of Oxford

Dr Inken von Borzyskowski
University College London

Dr Jennifer Cook
University of Birmingham

Dr Jim A.C. Everett
University of Kent 

Dr Tobias Hauser
University College London

Dr Patricia Lockwood
University of Birmingham

Dr Netta Weinstein
University of Reading

Dr Jennifer Coates
University of Sheffield

Dr Mohamad Hafeda
Leeds Beckett University 

Dr Lonán Ó Briain
University of Nottingham

Dr Martin O’Brien
Queen Mary, University of London 

Dr Annebella Pollen
University of Brighton

Gala Dinner Programme

Classics
 

Dr Tom Geue
School of Classics, University of St Andrews
Tom Geue’s work in Latin literature stands out for its freshness of approach and its theoretical rigour. His two monographs, Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (Harvard University Press, 2019), explore the paradoxical power of anonymity, the first in relation to the self-concealing strategies of the satirist Juvenal, the second in relation to a range of self-consciously anonymous texts (this work is already inspiring international conferences). Another strand in his work (the application of Marxist theory to Latin literature) is represented by an equally agenda-setting Journal of Roman Studies article on the poetics of slavery and imperialism in Virgil’s Georgics. Dr Geue is also a dynamic collaborator, working with colleagues to organise stimulating and theoretically engaged conferences and (with Dr Elena Giusti) co-editing an impressively international volume on the politics of absence in Latin literature. A visible and energetic presence in the field, he is always a key participant in the most interesting conversations taking place in Latin literary studies.
 

Dr Theodora Jim
Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham
Since finishing her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, Theodora Jim has established herself as a brilliant and distinctive voice in the study of ancient Greek religion. In her first monograph, Sharing with the Gods (Oxford University Press, 2014), through a clutch of important, related articles and in her current work on the concept of ‘salvation’, she has brought to life the lived experience of everyday worship in the Greek world, moving beyond the stark choice of ritual or belief that has often characterised previous scholarship. Her work is notable for its meticulous detail – drawing on the widest range of literary, epigraphic and material evidence – but also, increasingly, for its pioneering use of comparative data. By setting Classical and Hellenistic Greek religion alongside the rich evidence for Chinese polytheism and not only modern Christianity, Dr Jim’s work has the potential not only to shed new light on old questions within Greek religion, but also to serve as a beacon for further comparative study.
 

Dr Giuseppe Pezzini
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
Over the last 10 years, Giuseppe Pezzini has emerged as an extraordinarily wide-ranging scholar of Latin language and literature, remarkable for the combination of linguistic philology and technical skills in linguistics, metre, textual criticism and digital humanities, alongside theoretically informed and culturally sensitive literary criticism. His first book, Terence and the Verb ‘To Be’ in Latin (Oxford University Press, 2015), is anything but a dry account, as its title might suggest, of a fundamental but extremely familiar verb; rather, it is a highly engaging and original discussion of how this core element of the language functioned in the cognitive experience of its native speakers. A second book is an edition of, and commentary on, one of the plays of Terence, while at the other end of the chronological spectrum is a group of publications on Tolkien’s reception of Classics. A further area of interest is theories of fiction and of comedy. A new project combining language, philosophy and cultural interaction will explore the relationship between the Roman Republic and the Kingdom of Pergamon.
 

Dr Henry Stead
School of Classics, University of St Andrews
Since obtaining his PhD in 2011, Henry Stead has established himself as a leading figure in classical reception studies, both in his published research and through his industry and energy in forging connections among scholars and students in this and related fields in the UK and beyond. Since the publication of his first monograph, A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821 (Oxford University Press, 2015), he has produced a series of fascinating and revealing novel studies that pioneer new approaches to the place of Classics in British working-class culture, the appropriation of Classics by leftist intellectuals and classical influences on the twentieth-century Scottish literary Renaissance. His jointly authored study with Edith Hall, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (Routledge, 2020), is a monumental achievement and a landmark in the discipline.
 

Dr Kathryn Stevens
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
Kathryn Stevens’ first article after her PhD in 2013, ‘Secrets in the library’, won a prize from the International Association of Assyriology. She has subsequently led international projects to consider ancient celestial scholarship as demonstrated in astronomical diaries and chronography, developing in the process a powerful range of philological and critical skills. Her monograph, Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019), nominated for an award by the American Society of Overseas Research, has changed the field. Dr Stevens illuminates the period after Alexander the Great to show how the political pressures of this new world of monarchies affected not just knowledge transmission, but knowledge production, in the various parts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Having shown how Babylonia can be understood as part of the Hellenistic intellectual world, she now intends to extend her analysis to include Egypt and Judaea.

Earth Sciences
 

Dr Nicolas Brantut
Earth Sciences, University College London
Nicolas Brantut is a rock physicist who studies coupled physico-chemical processes during brittle and ductile deformation to understand deformation in the Earth’s crust. His early work, using a novel high-velocity deformation apparatus, established that dehydration and other metamorphic reactions could significantly reduce friction during seismic rupture, without the need for frictional melting. He continues to refine this work, having developed criteria for when fluid pressurisation can dominate over runaway frictional heating. At the other extreme in strain rate, his work on the thermodynamics of chemical reactions at crack tips in evolving deformation zones has transformed our understanding of stress corrosion and crack healing in rocks, and of the processes leading to the initiation of faulting. These studies typify the way that Dr Brantut combines careful experimental observations with a rigorous understanding of the underlying physics, which has allowed him to make these, and several other, groundbreaking contributions in just 10 years since completing his PhD.
 

Dr Andrea Burke
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews
Andrea Burke is a geochemist who uses isotope ratios to study earth system processes. Her early work used the ratio of radioactive carbon-14 to carbon-12 to demonstrate, for the first time, changes in Southern Ocean circulation in response to deglaciation 20,000 years ago. Since moving to the University of St Andrews, she has transferred her focus to the sulfur isotope system. Sulfur’s stable isotopes are unusual in that they can undergo mass-independent fractionation due to interactions with ultraviolet radiation. This provides a means to identify past volcanic eruptions large enough to penetrate the stratosphere. To realise this potential, Dr Burke has pioneered the use of new mass spectrometric methods to precisely measure sulfur isotopes in ice cores stretching back 100,000 years. Her work has not only identified hitherto unknown giant eruptions, but also has linked their climatic consequences to major archaeological events.
 

Dr Paula Koelemeijer
Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London
Paula Koelemeijer is a geophysicist who has made major advances in constraining the structure and dynamics of the deepest mantle, integrating seismology with mineral physics and geodynamics. She made the first unequivocal observations of Stoneley modes, a type of normal modes, or standing oscillations of the Earth, excited by large earthquakes. Her robust constraints have revealed that the large low-seismic-velocity regions at the base of the mantle (termed LLVPs) are lighter than the surrounding mantle, with any dense material restricted to a thin basal layer. Her three-dimensional (3D) model of seismic velocities for the whole mantle, being more strongly constrained than other models, is routinely compared with simulations of mantle geodynamics. Her involvement in public outreach and citizen science includes study of the worldwide reduction of seismic noise due to COVID-19 lockdowns and providing open source software for portraying scalar fields of the Earth and planets using 3D printing.
 

Dr Erin Saupe
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Erin Saupe is a highly productive and internationally recognised scientist who investigates interactions between life and its physical environment on long geological timescales, addressing fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of biodiversity. Crossing seamlessly between contemporary ecology and earth sciences, she applies a range of research tools including ecological niche modelling – a field to which she has contributed important methodological insights and in which she has demonstrated the phenomenon of phylogenetic niche conservatism on a timescale of tens of millions of years. Her research is helping to define the emerging field of conservation palaeobiology, whereby information from the past is deployed to inform present-day conservation strategy. Dr Saupe plans to use the prize to address the significance of anthropogenic environmental change for marine phytoplankton biodiversity and ecosystem function, and its implications for our pelagic food resources.
 

Dr Nem Vaughan
School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
Nem Vaughan is a climate change scientist with world-leading expertise in climate change mitigation and greenhouse gas removal methods in the context of net zero emissions targets. Her early work provided the first robust assessment of the effectiveness of geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal methods, highlighting the need for more complete and holistic assessments. Subsequently, Dr Vaughan has led critical evaluations of mitigation plans centred around the use of technology called Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), pioneering multistakeholder approaches that cross boundaries between academia, industry, policy and civil society. The insights from her research have been highly influential, both through citations in the IPCC special reports and through stimulating new research to understand the real-world feasibility of carbon removal through largescale afforestation and BECCS. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, vitally important for policymakers and stands to stimulate a paradigm shift in understanding and communicating the role of greenhouse gas removal within future emission scenarios.
 

Physics
 

Dr Jayne Birkby
Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Jayne Birkby has played a key role in the emerging science of exoplanet studies. She led the study that showed the first clear detection of water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. To enable this, she produced a novel technique to analyse high-resolution spectra, which relies on the Doppler shift in the spectral features of the planet against the more stable background from the host star and the atmosphere of the Earth. She later extended the technique to measure the day length on a young exoplanet, thus opening the potential for a study into how exoplanets gain their angular momentum during their formation. Dr Birkby’s observations of planetary atmospheres, when coupled with upcoming large observing facilities, will be used to perform in-depth studies of formation, migration, surface structure and weather on a range of exoplanetary systems, as well as to search for biosignature gases on the most nearby rocky exoplanets.
 

Dr Radha Boya
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester
Radha Boya’s expertise is in nanofabrication of molecular-scale capillaries and their use in studying confined fluids. Her method and measurement techniques are original and unique, and have led to unparalleled measurements relating to the flow and confinement properties of water and hydrated ions. In particular, recent pioneering measurements demonstrated controlled transport of water through capillaries so thin that hydrated ions are excluded. Such measurements may provide the basis for future technologies based on atomic-precision filtration of gases and liquids. Filtration is crucial for several environmental challenges, such as water desalination and carbon dioxide capture. Dr Boya has demonstrated that by tuning the surface chemistry as well as the pore size, filtration based on chemical affinity and geometry can be adapted for different needs.
 

Dr Denis Martynov
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham
Denis Martynov played a key role in the commissioning of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, Louisiana, making it the most sensitive interferometer in the world and enabling the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015, arguably the scientific discovery of the century. In this complex and challenging task, he demonstrated an exceptional combination of theoretical knowledge and experimental creativity. The sensitivity of modern measurements is limited by quantum noise and Dr Martynov’s expertise in the application of quantum measurement techniques places him in a particularly strong position to design and develop new technologies for future gravitational wave and dark matter detectors. In this context, the prize will support his projects on quantum amplification, to explore active optical resonators to improve the signal-to-noise ratio using a novel approach and to perform theoretical investigations towards an optimal quantum amplifier.
 

Dr Jonathan Matthews
School of Physics, University of Bristol
Jonathan Matthews works on quantum photonics and is co-Director of the University of Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Technology laboratories. He developed the transfer of quantum photonic devices from optical tables to optical chips that could be manufactured at scale, thereby establishing a new field of integrated quantum photonics. He demonstrated the first programmable control of quantum light on a chip and realised a fully universal two-qubit quantum processor capable of implementing proof-of-principle quantum algorithms. This work has provided the base technology for several quantum technology start-ups. Dr Matthews has made many other outstanding contributions to quantum photonics, including the development of the world’s fastest quantum light detector. He will use the prize to work on quantum sensing and on extending the limits of what is possible with quantum metrology.
 

Dr Samuel Stranks
Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge
Energy materials is an intensely competitive research area, with good reason: it not only holds potential for enormous business growth but will drive future technologies that may help to avert climate catastrophe. By training, Sam Stranks defies categorisation, but his trajectory was set when he commenced his doctoral work in 2008 at Oxford in organic solar cells. Since then, he has gained national and global recognition for his pioneering research in perovskite materials. His groundbreaking publications have led to deep new understanding based on his blend of materials fabrication, characterisation and photophysics, leading to enormous interest across the globe in the promise of a new generation of efficient solar cells. Not content with that, he is intent on using the novel materials to develop single-photon emitters, which would open a further range of applications for his remarkable work.
 

Politics and International Relations
 

Professor Teresa Bejan
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Teresa Bejan has established herself as an internationally leading scholar on toleration, freedom of expression and calls for ‘civility’ in politics. Her book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017), is a sophisticated and erudite examination of ideas of civility in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Roger Williams, and a defence of Williams’ approach in particular. Professor Bejan convincingly shows how studying these thinkers’ arguments can illuminate the contemporary debates about the nature and value of freedom of speech and what norms should govern the way we engage with each other. More generally, her research shows an extraordinary breadth, including debates in contemporary political theory as well as a wide range of earlier political thinkers.
 

Dr Christopher Claassen
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
Christopher Claassen has established himself as a leading scholar on the links between the attitudes and opinions of the public and macro-scale forces of demographic and institutional change. He has made important contributions to how to best combine survey data across time and space and generate more reliable estimates for smaller sub-groups. His work shows that popular support can sustain democratic systems but does not by itself help bring about transitions to democracy. He finds evidence of thermostatic effects in support for democracy, where threats to roll back democratic institutions increase public support, while counter-majoritarian changes to protect minority rights can produce a popular backlash. He will use the prize funds to extend his work on support for democracy to how political trust influences institutional stability and change, drawing on both new and existing data in countries that have seen democratic backsliding.
 

Dr Graham Denyer Willis
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Graham Denyer Willis astutely deploys exacting political ethnography to examine the interaction between state and society in the megacities of the global south. By conducting extended ethnographic work amongst the homicide police and the population of gang-controlled areas in Latin America’s largest city, São Paulo, Brazil, his work documents how violence shapes the lives of the city’s marginalised populations. He then uses these rich empirical insights to examine how states transformed by the ‘third wave’ of democratisation have sought to control their populations in the face of rapid urbanisation. The result is a powerful and original work of political science, which forces us to rethink how we understand the state’s relationship to violence based as it is on the ‘practice of abandonment as a form of rule, in which direct violence is made possible, logical and uncontestable’. The work of Dr Denyer Willis is original and innovative social science.
 

Dr Janina Dill
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Janina Dill’s work on the issues raised within the broad field of just war theory brings a set of distinct and original perspectives to bear on the central questions of whether and how far law and morality can act as effective checks on the conduct of war. As her published works have ably demonstrated, she brings to the inquiry perspectives from international law, ethical philosophy and international relations theory, backed by a scrupulous attention to empirical evidence, to establish the ways in which the use of force has been conceived and organised in particular contexts. In doing so, she has developed some novel and unexpected insights into the decision-making involved in the conduct of war and also into the attitudes of the non-combatants who are on the receiving end of the violence that is the consequence of these decisions. Dr Dill will use the prize to take these aspects of her work further, thereby helping to investigate the many implications of the normative and psychological facets of the conduct of war for civilians and soldiers alike.
 

Dr Inken von Borzyskowski
Department of Political Science, University College London
Inken von Borzyskowski has an outstanding record of research in international relations, specifically the study of international organisations. Her work on international democracy assistance is groundbreaking and the topic of her book, The Credibility Challenge: How Democracy Aid Influences Election Violence (Cornell University Press, 2019). Her conclusion that international election observation is not uniformly a good idea, as outside observers can exacerbate post-election violence when they criticise election quality, has profound implications for policy and governance. Dr von Borzyskowski has an exceptional publication record in a wide range of esteemed journals. Her work is characterised by excellent use of advanced methods and the collection of original data. Her future research plans build on these achievements and promise more innovation in connecting the work of international organisations to decision-making in US legislative politics.
 

Psychology
 

Dr Jennifer Cook
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
Jennifer Cook is dedicated to conducting world-class research in sociability. In her PhD, she noticed and then rigorously investigated autistic adults’ distinctive patterns of movement, which impact upon their social interaction. These impacts are better understood as arising from social mismatch than from a ‘deficit’, as is usually attributed to the autistic individual alone. This significant advance led to the award of the Frith Prize by the Experimental Psychology Society, for exceptional doctoral work. In later research, she showed that social learning does not involve different neurocognitive processes from those involved in other kinds of learning. Given this, why do people differ in their social ability? Dr Cook is now exploring the origins and mechanisms of sociability in humans and other species, examining social networks in which some are well-connected ‘nodes’ and others more isolated. She uses neuroimaging, behavioural, psychopharmacological and comparative studies, for example, collaborating with others who study the basis of social networks in bees. Her research programme is exciting, original and important.
 

Dr Jim A.C. Everett
School of Psychology, University of Kent
Since completing his DPhil in 2017, Jim Everett has established himself as an internationally outstanding researcher in experimental social psychology. Drawing on a wide range of methods from behavioural economics and philosophy as well as psychology, he has developed a radically new perspective on moral and political psychology. For example, his highly influential two-dimensional model of the psychology of utilitarianism distinguishes between being prepared to harm others for the greater good and being willing to make personal sacrifices to maximise fairness and general well-being. Individuals have different attitudes along these dimensions and are perceived accordingly. This and many other strands of Dr Everett’s work have wide implications not just for theoretical understanding but for the success, failure and consequences of different political leadership strategies. His work has been recognised by Fulbright and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships, as well as by his receipt of several awards including the 2018 Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize.
 

Dr Tobias Hauser
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London
Since gaining his PhD in 2014, Tobias Hauser has established himself as an acknowledged expert on human decision-making. His research investigates how humans make decisions and why their decision-making is inconsistent. Even when faced with exactly the same options, people’s decisions are often inconsistent. Dr Hauser combines computational modelling, multimodal neuroimaging and pharmacological manipulations to study the neurocognitive mechanisms that drive these inconsistencies. Another feature of his research is that he combines work on healthy individuals with research on patients with mental health disorders, shedding light on psychiatric problems. His research output has been published in leading journals and has already attracted prestigious awards and significant external funding.
 

Dr Patricia Lockwood
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
Patricia Lockwood is an incredibly talented social cognitive neuroscientist working at the intersection of psychological sciences, computational cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Her research is best characterised as a theory-driven quest to uncover the neural mechanisms of what makes us effective prosocial beings. She was one of the first to show, in children with antisocial behaviour, the specific neurobiological correlates of processing others’ pain, contributing substantially to the recognition of conduct disorders as neurodevelopmental. More recently, she has been developing paradigms to uncover the neural mechanisms of how we learn to help each other. This work has allowed researchers from around the world to move away from questionnaire-type methods in prosocial research and to rely more on neurocognitive methods. Dr Lockwood has an outstanding publication record in top-quality international scientific journals and is at the heart of major international collaborations, ensuring that her work is widely read and has maximum scientific impact.
 

Dr Netta Weinstein
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading
Netta Weinstein is a prolific and influential researcher, making distinctive contributions to the academic discipline, the relevance and timeliness of which has attracted the attention of both media and policymakers, so changing policy and practice. She completed her PhD at the University of Rochester and, after a one-year postdoc in Hamburg, rose rapidly through the UK academic ranks of Lecturer and Senior Lecturer to become Associate Professor at the University of Reading. Her research in experimental social psychology uses a range of methodologies, including experimental, longitudinal, diary methodologies and big data. Her current research is exploring the balance between solitude and sociability and how time alone contributes to well-being. However, her research interests are broad, looking at issues of social motivation in a wide range of contexts, including education, parenting, prejudice and biases in the workplace. She has a correspondingly wide range of collaborative partners, including non-academic stakeholders.
 

Visual and Performing Arts
 

Dr Jennifer Coates
School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield
Since her 2014 PhD at SOAS University of London, Jennifer Coates has deservedly established a highly impressive international reputation with prizes and fellowships awarded in Australia, Japan, the UK and the US for her cutting edge interdisciplinary research on Japanese visual and performing arts. Her monograph, Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema 1945–1964 (Hong Kong University Press, 2016), is widely acknowledged as having broken new ground in its art-historical approach to the study of the representation of women in a peak period of film-making and artistic innovation. Her new book (out in 2022) will also innovate with its, as yet rare, focus on questions of Japanese cultural spectatorship. Alongside her prodigious record of high-quality scholarly publications, she has also contributed enormously to wider forms of research life and public culture in her organisation of key conferences, symposia and exhibitions, as well as in her production of a significant documentary film on Japanese cinema. Her exciting new project, on the creation of public personae in Japan, will take her and the field in further new directions.
 

Dr Mohamad Hafeda
Leeds School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University
Mohamad Hafeda is an internationally recognised artist, writer and academic whose interdisciplinary, socially engaged practice explores the politics of urban space, with particular attention to issues of borders, displacement and representation. Working between London and Beirut, he collaborates with communities to explore their lived experience of displacement as a counterpoint to political metanarratives, resulting in urban interventions, art installations, films and writings. With his art collective Febrik, Dr Hafeda develops projects around the topic of ‘play’, negotiating the dynamics and politics of urban space for under-represented groups. He has previously been commissioned by the UN to develop public spaces in camps in North Lebanon and Jordan and has worked with the Serpentine and South London Galleries. His latest book, Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (Bloomsbury, 2019), and his future research both question how time is used to control space and the movement of displaced communities in Lebanon and the UK and also how it might be mobilised as a form of tactical resistance.
 

Dr Lonán Ó Briain
Department of Music, University of Nottingham
Lonán Ó Briain works primarily on the music of minority cultures in South East Asia, notably Vietnam. His work has contributed to a wider understanding of the ways in which marginalised people use their cultural heritage to maintain community and identity. Dr Ó Briain has also looked at the impact that media and technology make on such cultures and ways in which media can change the cultural, social and political landscape in countries outside the Anglophone world. His research has worldwide reach and significance in examining the interface between inherited culture, modern technological developments and the future of marginalised peoples. Based on ethnographic field research in the Lower Mekong Basin, his future plans will seek to identify how minority communities are coping with environmental challenges, social upheaval and climate change in a world where societal values are more and more under pressure. This project will involve collaboration with NGOs, artists, policymakers and higher education institutions locally in facilitating a cross-border study of cultures, communities and the environment.
 

Dr Martin O’Brien
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London
Martin O’Brien is a highly original practice-based research and autoethnographic writer on performance and illness, who also has an impressive track record of live art practice research. Performance and medicine is an emerging field of enquiry, vast in scope and perforce interdisciplinary. Dr O’Brien’s position in this emergence is informed by excellent scholarship, creative imagination and personal experience. Due to their diligent and unique outputs to date, they have rightly earned accolades from both academics and the artistic community. Their planned project builds on a body of work in performance and writing, inflected by the experience of living with illness and, specifically now, shielding during the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the political implications of this pandemic and how it has affected community formation. Combining new live performance, a book and conference papers, this is research of strength, integrity and contemporary significance, informed by personal experience, but never solipsistic. Rather, it opens and expands understanding of the overlaps between medicine, performance and disability in culture today.
 

Dr Annebella Pollen
Centre for Design History, University of Brighton
Annebella Pollen is one of the most exciting historians of the visual arts of her generation. She has reached a wide international audience through her monographs, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (Donlon Books, 2015) – also interpreted as the exhibition Intellectual Barbarians with Nayia Yiakoumaki at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015–16) – and Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2015). Her new books, Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Atelier Éditions, 2021) and Art without Frontiers (2022), on the British Council’s art and design collection and its contribution to international cultural relations, will continue Dr Pollen’s valuable approach, which explains how cultural practices affect social change, expressing hope for a better world. Her proposed project on Children’s Photography: A Cultural History from Below will have similarly wide public appeal, focusing as it does on children as photographers, revealing a child’s-eye view of the world to shift our conceptualisation of childhood and its histories.

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

Gala Dinner Programme

Archaeology

Dr Kate Britton
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen
Kate Britton combines a flair for the scientific analysis of the chemistry of human and animal remains, with a sensitive understanding of cultural difference and an appreciation of the problems and potentials of archaeological evidence. Dr Britton has carried out important experimental work aimed at understanding the links between diet, movements and skeletal chemistry, which has helped set stable isotope analysis in archaeology on a new footing. Her work with Yup’ik archaeology in Alaska has sought to understand the nature and impact of past and present climate change, particularly on subsistence practices. In addition, she has carried out important archaeological analyses of mobility and diet on a range of periods from the Palaeolithic to the medieval and on topics including reindeer migrations and the breastfeeding of human infants. Her future plans include research into Scotland’s Ice Age past and what can be learned about life in historic North Sea cities from the analysis of human skeletal remains. 

Dr Enrico Crema
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
Enrico Crema is the leading expert internationally among a younger generation of archaeologists that is pioneering the development and application of novel computational, quantitative and modelling techniques to address the uncertainty and shortcomings of the archaeological record. The work depends on a combination of theoretical insight, deep understanding of archaeological evidence and computational ability that is extremely rare. His development of computer simulation methods tailor-made to cope with the idiosyncratic nature of the archaeological record, especially the uncertainty of archaeological dating, has benefitted archaeologists working in many different contexts. The same is true of his development of new statistical tools to use large collections of radiocarbon dates as a proxy for measuring past population dynamics. The latter work has led to the creation, with a colleague, of a software package that has been downloaded over 6,000 times. 

Dr Jessica Hendy
Department of Archaeology, University of York
Jessica Hendy is leading a new generation of archaeologists who are applying molecular techniques to address social and cultural questions of the past; questions that were previously intractable. Her research focuses on understanding past diets and cuisines through the study of ancient ‘food’ proteins that become entrapped on the surface of pots during food preparation or within dental calculus during its consumption. She has attracted worldwide attention for the identification of prehistoric milk proteins, revealing the species of animals exploited for their milk as well as insights into early dairy technology. The study of ancient proteins ‘palaeoproteomics’ brings an exciting new angle to studying cuisine and consumption but the field is still in its infancy. This Philip Leverhulme Prize will support Dr Hendy to establish the groundwork necessary to assure the reliability of the approach and assess the limits of molecular preservation in a wide range of time periods and archaeological contexts. 

Dr Jane Kershaw
School of Archaeology, University of Oxford
Jane Kershaw is a rising star in medieval archaeology, bringing new social perspectives to the study of Viking Age Europe. Her doctoral research on Viking artefacts revealed the significant role of women from the Viking homelands in the Scandinavian settlement of Britain, confirming that the Viking expansion was a large-scale migration of people rather than merely a (masculine) military campaign (Viking Identities). Her current research applies innovative perspectives from archaeological materials science to the study of Viking artefacts from across Europe to challenge existing theories on the economic origins of the Viking Age. She has also engaged in debate with genetic studies of contemporary populations and what they may (or may not) reveal about early medieval migration. Her research has been recognised by prestigious fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and currently a European Research Council Starter Grant on Viking silver and the silver economy.

Dr Ben Russell
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
Ben Russell is a pioneering scholar on Roman stone quarrying, trade and use as a commodity and on ancient craftsmanship and techniques more generally. Drawing on both supreme knowledge of ancient material evidence and written sources as well as modern sociological and economic theory, he has taken the practical aspects of Roman production out of their former niche existence and demonstrated their significant contribution and relevance to our understanding of the Roman economy and of Roman social history more broadly. His 2013 monograph, The Economics of the Roman Stone Trade (OUP), is widely praised as an essential reference work and landmark study and his work on ‘Makers and Making’ has hugely inspired new research. His most recent project continues his interest in building activities but takes him into an entirely innovative and original direction. It focuses on types of construction that were as ubiquitous as they are now neglected: earth and turf construction. 

Chemistry

Dr Artem Bakulin
Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London
Artem Bakulin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and outstanding physical chemist who develops and applies ultrafast spectroscopy techniques to provide a new level of understanding of molecular excited-state dynamics. He is internationally recognised for his work in applying these advanced spectroscopy techniques to molecular semiconductors and devices. In particular, the development of ‘pump-push photocurrent spectroscopy’ is regarded as an important and impactful breakthrough for the understanding of real electronic devices. His work is characterised by a willingness to tackle difficult and technically challenging problems combined with a choice of technologically relevant problems to address. He has published extensively in quality journals and his work is highly cited. The innovative nature of his work and the strong combination of fundamental science allied with relevance to applications is outstanding.

Dr Thomas Bennett
Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge
Thomas Bennett is a materials chemist who has invented a whole new field of hybrid glasses based on an exciting type of solid called metal-organic frameworks – the first new broad class of glass to be discovered since the 1970s. Bennett’s discovery that these crystalline solids can melt to form porous liquids was a surprise to the community and has stimulated great interest. His subsequent work showing that the liquids quench cool to form glasses has changed the way we think about these fascinating materials and opened up a wealth of opportunities in coatings and optically active solids where we are looking for properties intermediate between traditional brittle inorganic glasses and softer polymer-based glasses.

Dr Kim Jelfs
Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London
Kim Jelfs conducts pioneering research on the development of computational approaches for the discovery of porous materials and for prediction of their properties. She has a remarkable track record and has made highly significant contributions to the computationally led discovery of porous cage structures. Her work is equally leading for other porous materials, including organic polymers, amorphous materials and metal-organic frameworks. The adaptability of her scientific strategy has been demonstrated with her recent investigations of organic electronic materials in which she demonstrates the exploration of the energy–structure–function landscape of solid-state materials to inform and direct the design of new molecules for organic electronics. 

Dr Daniele Leonori
School of Chemistry, University of Manchester
Daniele Leonori has adopted nitrogen-centred radicals as a major theme of his work and has illustrated numerous novel approaches involving photoredox chemistry with a wealth of applications. This includes (i) the preparation of amidyl radicals from aryloxyamides using eosin Y and deployment of these radicals in N–C bond formations to arenes and alkenes, (ii) reductive and oxidative routes to iminyl radicals and transposition of these radicals to carbon radicals that can then be functionalised with a variety of functional groups, including fluorine atoms and (iii) generation of aliphatic amine radical cations for regioselective arylation reactions. His papers are highly cited and illustrate diversity of chemistry, originality of thought and excellent mechanistic insights.

Dr Silvia Vignolini
Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Silvia Vignolini is internationally recognised for her original research on biological photonic materials, at the interface of chemistry, physics, biology and materials science. Her research has generated deep insights into the photonic structures that have evolved for manipulating light in natural flora and fauna. For example, she has demonstrated the importance of disordered nanostructures in the petals of flowers for producing visual signals that are recognised by pollinating insects. She has exploited insights gained from studying nature to create artificial self-assembled bio-mimetic materials from biopolymers such as cellulose and chitin. This work on bio-inspired optical materials has potential commercial impact in the manufacture of films of cellulose nano-crystals that are highly scattering and bright white, or coloured, purely as a consequence of their photonic structures.

Economics

Dr Gabriella Conti
Department of Economics and the Department of Social Science, University College London
Gabriella Conti has been at the forefront of research drawing on both the biomedical and the social sciences to understand the developmental origins of health inequalities and the behavioural and biological pathways through which early life conditions affect well-being throughout the life-course. Her work straddles a traditional divide between disciplines and the quality of her work has been recognised in both biomedical and social science fields. She has published widely in prestigious journals such as Science, PNAS, The Economic Journal, the Journal of Econometrics and The Lancet. Her Philip Leverhulme Prize will be used to investigate the long-term impact on health of one of the largest programmes in the world targeted at early years interventions, the UK Health Visitor Programme. 

Professor James Fenske
Department of Economics, University of Warwick
Developing a richer understanding of the roots of economic development in Asia, through exploiting new and innovative sources of data, lies at the heart of James Fenske’s research agenda. His publications combine a rich historical and institutional knowledge with careful and creative empirical analysis. To date, much of his work has been focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, although more recently he has turned his attention to India. His research ranges widely, including land tenure, slavery, ethnic inequality, education, polygamy, infant mortality and adult mental health. All of this research is characterised by the utilisation of some unique data sources, for example merging ethnographic data with spatial data from geographic information systems, or digitisation of records previously unavailable to researchers. He is a leading member of a pioneering group of economic historians causing us to reappraise our understanding of colonial developments and their significance for contemporary societies.

Dr Xavier Jaravel
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Although it is widely recognised that productivity increases are crucial for economic growth, relatively little is known about either the social and economic processes that drive innovations or the distribution of the welfare gains that they induce. Through a series of empirical studies published in leading international journals, Xavier Jaravel’s work demonstrates the important interactions between inequality and productivity dynamics. In particular, his analysis using scanner data for millions of products finds that the price effects of product innovations have strengthened inequality in the US, while another paper shows that inequality feeds into innovation because (all other things being equal) the chances of becoming an inventor are lower for women, minorities and children from low-income families. His work has also established the importance of teamwork for inventors’ careers and shown that consumer price declines due to international trade are spread equally across all income groups. 

Professor Friederike Mengel
Department of Economics, University of Essex
Friederike Mengel studies microeconomic behaviour through the lens of innovative dynamic models and experiments. Her research made significant progress in our understanding of the emergence of cooperation when agents do not simply meet randomly to interact, the standard assumption in much of the classical literature, but are, for instance, part of a social network or sort themselves endogenously into groups. Her work shows the crucial importance of such micro structures in populations. Similarly innovative are her investigations into learning processes when agents play more than one game at a time and when, due to cognitive limitations, spillovers between games may occur. She has recently won a European Research Council Starting Grant to study the exciting and topical theme of opinion dynamics. 

Professor Benjamin Moll
Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Benjamin Moll’s research lies at the forefront of macroeconomics and deals with issues related to economic inequality as well as the implications of the heterogeneous nature that characterises economic agents. His work utilises an impressive array of technical skills in developing heterogeneous agent models which is allied to extensive empirical investigations and has been published widely in the highest quality journals in economics. His future research agenda is equally ambitious and aims to address a number of important questions in macroeconomics that require an integrated approach to studying both macroeconomic aggregates as well as their underlying distributional characteristics. The results of this research agenda have the potential to have a considerable impact on the design of economic policy.

Engineering

Dr Jessica Boland
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester
Jessica Boland is an internationally recognised expert in ultrafast spectroscopy and the development of terahertz devices, having pioneered the use of terahertz spectroscopy for non-contact, non-destructive electrical characterisation. Her research focuses on combining ultrafast optical-pump terahertz-probe spectroscopy with scanning near-field optical microscopy to provide a unique tool for examining the ultrafast carrier dynamics of III-V nanostructures, 2D materials and topological insulators with femtosecond temporal resolution, nanometre spatial resolution and surface sensitivity. Her novel devices enable impacts in sectors as diverse as healthcare and security. Her work has been recognised by the receipt of a number of prestigious prizes, including the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award, the Institute of Physics Jocelyn Bell Burnell medal and by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. 

Dr Rainer Groh
Faculty of Engineering, University of Bristol
Rainer Groh’s research is providing important new insights into the design of aerospace structures, including work with NASA to reduce the weight of satellite launchers and thus improve their performance. His work includes the development of multi-functional structures that can change their shape to adapt to different operating conditions. Dr Groh also works at the boundaries between disciplines, collaborating with computer scientists to develop shape-changing materials for human–computer interaction. The breadth of his research is also demonstrated through a novel collaboration with biologists to understand how moths exploit aeroelastic effects to emit acoustic clicks to jam predator echolocation. 

Dr Hannah Joyce
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
Hannah Joyce has achieved international recognition for her research into engineering nanomaterials. A particular focus has been in conceiving new functionalities of optoelectronic devices that have exceptional performance characteristics. Examples include the achievement of an ultrafast switchable terahertz polarisation modulator, bulk limits for electron mobilities in nanowires and perfect crystallographic phase tuning in nanowire growth. Her research spans the study of the fundamental aspects of semiconductor nanomaterials through to developing new technologies, such as solar cells. She has published exceptional findings in highly respected journals that bridge the gap between fundamental science and engineering. Her research is funded by EPSRC research grants. A current European Research Council Starting Grant also demonstrates the high recognition of her research at an early career stage.

Dr Camille Petit
Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London
Camille Petit is an internationally recognised expert in the field of porous materials. Her Philip Leverhulme Prize will be used to investigate the development of new photocatalytic materials to convert CO₂ into a valuable fuel using the energy from sunlight. The design and manufacturing of a sustainable, efficient, robust photocatalyst is highly challenging; her project will focus on a new photocatalyst family. Reduction of CO₂ is of major importance in mitigating the effects of global warming and climate change. Dr Petit’s work will contribute to the United Nations development goal of achieving environmental sustainability, one of the main challenges facing society today and in future decades.

Dr Alister Smith
School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University
The future may well be digital, but most of our underpinning infrastructure is still dependent on large-scale physical assets, much of it built many years ago, with no embedded real-time performance monitoring. Recent events in the UK and abroad of actual and incipient dam failures warn us why this is of critical importance, posing major risks to life and the environment. Alister Smith’s research has developed a means of landslide early warning by interpreting high-frequency noise, known as acoustic emissions, generated by soil in the subsurface when the ground moves. His goal is to revolutionise infrastructure stewardship with acoustic emissions sensing. If we can listen to geotechnical assets (e.g. buried pipelines, foundations, retaining structures etc.) with intelligent sensors, analogous to a stethoscope used for a patient’s heartbeat, then Dr Smith believes we will be able to provide information on infrastructure condition and early warning of deterioration in real-time. His vision is of a family of acoustic emission sensors distributed globally, protecting people and infrastructure.

Geography

Dr Sarah Batterman
School of Geography, University of Leeds
Sarah Batterman, a graduate of Princeton University, is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. Over the last five years she has been working as a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellow and has established herself as a leading global figure in symbiotic nitrogen fixation and tropical forests as carbon sinks. In particular, recent work has focused on how trees with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen may help store additional CO₂. Her work is concurrently examining contemporary biogeochemical processes through fertilisation experiments in tropical forests along with the evolutionary history of nitrogen fixers. Her recent journal papers have been published in Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Plants, Ecology Letters, Journal of Ecology and Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Dr Batterman’s work will create impact and inform policy makers and practitioners about the potential for carbon offsets in tropical regions and how to build forests that are resilient to and help combat climate change.

Professor Christina Hicks
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
Christina Hicks has already forged an international reputation for producing insightful and actionable research on how the livelihoods of people living in some of the most economically marginal communities in the world are often heavily reliant on a relatively small number of food sources, where fish is a vital source micronutrients. By using an impressive array of theories and innovative methods she has shown how geographical, gendered and economic relationships heavily affect who enjoys greater food security and who does not. She plans to use the Philip Leverhulme Prize to undertake fresh research in West Africa which investigates how new waves of trade and investment into the region are radically reshaping peoples’ ability to enjoy more sustainable livelihoods.

Professor Robert Hilton
Department of Geography, University of Durham
Robert Hilton has opened up a new research frontier that relates to how carbon released by erosion and weathering is affecting and in turn being affected by a warming climate. This topic speaks directly to broader debates on the extent to which climate change may be producing much bigger, cascading effects than is commonly supposed. Uniquely, his work is forging new connections between the Earth’s interior (tectonics), surface (topography, erosion) and biogeochemical flows (of carbon). He plans to use the Philip Leverhulme Prize to undertake important new research that studies the fate of carbon locked into the permafrost regions of Canada that are already experiencing much faster rates of warming than the global average.

Dr Fiona McConnell
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
Fiona McConnell is an outstanding scholar and research leader who has made a significant contribution to the development of political geography and international relations. Her innovative work on diplomacy and geopolitics among non-state entities combines theoretical sophistication with empirical rigour and has been influential within the diplomatic community. Over the past decade she has developed an impressive track record of prestigious research funding, prizes and international invitations as well as making an important contribution to the wider discipline through her editorial roles and work with research groups of the Royal Geographical Society. Her proposal to use the Philip Leverhulme Prize to research the right to diplomacy promises to produce impactful work that will benefit excluded communities.

Dr Philippa Williams
School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Philippa Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research concerns everyday experiences of the state in South Asia and, as her monograph on Everyday Peace demonstrates, how questions of citizenship are articulated through processes of violent and nonviolent marginalisation. In her current work on the ‘Digital India’ programme she has become increasingly interested in how digital technology is mediating everyday political life. The Philip Leverhulme Prize will enable her to develop this exploration of the impact of digital transformations, especially how these relate to digital healthcare and social media like WhatsApp. 

Languages and Literatures

Professor Marc Alexander
Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow
Marc Alexander has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his outstanding work on historical semantics and the evolution of meanings in English. His long-term work as the third Director and Chief Editor of the Historical Thesaurus of English has been impressive in terms of the product itself: it is the world’s largest thesaurus and the only historical thesaurus for any language, documenting the histories and shifts of meaning over a thousand years. Much of Professor Alexander’s subsequent research builds on the Thesaurus dataset, focusing on meaning in texts and engaging with interdisciplinary work with historians and computer scientists. His expertise in historical semantics allows him to investigate change in the English language from small and large-scale perspectives and capitalise on the complex and comprehensive data captured in the Thesaurus.

Dr Emma Bond
School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews
Emma Bond’s two monographs and four edited volumes have established her as a major figure in both Italian Studies and Comparative Literature. Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini (2012) and Writing Migration through the Body (2018) offer unique insight into Italian literature in a transnational framework. Her work exploring the circulation of people, texts and objects has most recently taken her into the fields of the creative humanities and museum studies. The quality and range of her interdisciplinary research has been recognised by a series of awards and visiting fellowships in the UK, Europe and the US. She is currently collaborating with a number of museums and other non-academic partners on projects which investigate transnational memories of colonialism and empire and their imprint on exhibition practice. Her work extends the methodological parameters of modern languages and redefines its contribution to contemporary research in the humanities. 

Dr Merve Emre
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford 
For a scholar who successfully defended her PhD as recently as 2015, Merve Emre has been extraordinarily productive, with books published or forthcoming on a range of topics, alongside countless essays and reviews. Each of her works has made a significant contribution to its field. Paraliterary raises crucial, but often overlooked, questions about the differences in reading practice inside and outside the academy. The Personality Brokers maps the pervasive global influence of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator on education and business, was selected as a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times Book Critics, NPR, The Economist, The Spectator, CBC and is currently being turned into a HBO documentary. The Ferrante Letters is an experimentally collaborative work that contributes to ‘collective criticism’. Future plans include a major monograph on ‘estrangement’ and ‘alienation’ in the novel from Henry James to the present. 

Professor Martin Eve
Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Martin Eve has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in digital humanities, computational methodologies and publishing practice. His interdisciplinary research addresses the digital and the literary and he has published significant work on contemporary American fiction (focusing on Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace), alongside monographs on open access and the humanities, the contested relations between contemporary fiction and criticism and close reading with computers. He has been active in the formation of open access policy in higher education and has established a number of platforms and tools in relation to digital humanities and computational resources. In the next phase of his research, Professor Eve will consider the political economies of literary art when the source is both digital and illicit.

Dr Joe Moshenska
Faculty of English, University of Oxford
Joe Moshenska is the author of Feeling Pleasures (2014), a study of touch in Renaissance literature: it also looks at topics including the touching of relics, the handling of paintings and philosophical accounts of tickling. He followed it with a book based on archival research but addressed to a wide audience, A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby (2016), reconstructing the journey that this wide-ranging Catholic author made through the Mediterranean in 1628. His most recent book, Iconoclasm as Child’s Play (2019), considers the anthropological and religious implications of the fact that during the Reformation, images of saints and the like, once desecrated, were sometimes given to children as toys. He is now editing the letters of Kenelm Digby and working an ambitious study of the concept and practice of play in the Renaissance.

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 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
 

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 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 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