Our newest Fellows

Alpa Parmar

I joined Clare as a Fellow in Lent Term 2023 alongside my appointment as Lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the Law Faculty. I research the inner workings of the criminal justice process, specifically, how and why the criminal justice system is patterned by race. My recent projects have considered the enmeshment between migration control, criminal law and criminal justice and sentencing outcomes for minority ethnic groups. My research involves talking to people who are entangled in the criminal justice system as well as agents who perform criminal justice and migration control duties. My latest project involved observing immigration tribunal hearings for those being deported because of their criminality. Currently I’m working on a book that explores how migration is policed by ordinary police officers every day and the implications this has for the idea of borders and their control.

I completed my undergraduate in Social and Political Sciences, followed by an MPhil and PhD in Criminology and Law, all at Cambridge. I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at King’s College London and was at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford for five years and academic member of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales (2018-2022).

At Cambridge I teach Criminology, Sentencing and the Penal System, Criminal Procedure and Evidence and Criminal Justice and Human Rights. This year I will teach on a new course: ‘Race, Gender and the Law’ which I am excited about. I am pleased that my research directly informs my teaching and inspires students to think about what justice really means.

Juan Block

I joined Clare as the Reddaway Fellow in October 2022, and it has been a delight to get to know the community. I did my PhD at Washington University in the US and then moved to Cambridge as a postdoc. I started working in the field of bounded rationality and continued this work as a Janeway Fellow at the Faculty of Economics.

My research interests lie in the intersection of behavioural economics and microeconomics. I am interested in the different ways economic agents (e.g., consumers, firms, and governments) learn to find their best choices based on simple decision rules in environments where their behaviours are highly interconnected. These projects aim to disentangle the role of information and complexity in decision making. Another strand of my research seeks to understand under which conditions we should expect to see consensus or conflict in societies where groups are organised by leaders that aim to impose their preferred social norms. These results shed light on the determinants of conflict and segregation in societies.

At Cambridge, I am part of the Janeway Institute and the Centre for Science and Policy. I also teach game and contract theory at the Faculty of Economics. In addition to supervising students in Economics, I am an undergraduate tutor, helping the well-being team to support our students.

Laura Van Holstein

I joined Clare as a Junior Research Fellow in 2022, after completing my PhD at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 2021. I am an evolutionary biologist, primarily interested in the macroevolution (evolutionary processes ‘above’ the species level, such as speciation and extinction) and evolutionary ecology of our own lineage since it split from chimpanzees. Whilst the evolution of traits unique to our lineage, such as complex technology and language, have long been the focus of research, how the processes that regulated our evolution compare to those of other animals have received far less attention.

My research, though broad in its scope, has ats its underpinning a single question: how ‘unique’ were the context and determinants of the processes that gave rise to our species? In my research, I address these questions by applying computational, comparative, and genetic methods from evolutionary biology to the human fossil record.

In addition, I lead a Leakey Foundation-funded project in Guinea in which I study the only population of aquatically foraging chimpanzees as models for the evolution of aquatic resource use in our own lineage. I have been very warmly welcomed to Clare this past year, and am grateful to the College for finally allowing me back after putting me in the Winter Pool when I applied for my undergraduate degree in 2013!

Lizzy Conder

I joined Clare College as its new Bursar in October 2022 having spent the past 8 years working in finance and strategic planning at the University of London latterly as its Director of Finance and Planning.

I completed my MA(Hons) in Modern History at University of St. Andrews in 1999 with my dissertation focusing on contemporary attitudes to military disciple in the First World War. I then spent 1999-2000 as the Robert T Jones Jr Fellow at Harvard University and a teaching fellow in its core programme supervising modules on First World War, American Civil War and the history of modern consumerism.

While I loved teaching, I had fallen out of love with writing during my year in the US, so I returned to UK to take a graduate accountancy trainee role with KPMG qualifying as a chartered accountant in 2003 focusing on international tax. I spent the next decade specialising in international tax (both corporate and global mobility) first in private equity with 3i plc and then with a small American headquartered multinational as well as qualifying as Chartered Tax Adviser in 2005. Wanting a new challenge and to work in the not-for-profit sector, I moved into University administration in 2014.

A strong believer in continuous learning, I trained and qualified as Scottish Country Dance teacher with the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society in 2017 (a three-year program of study) and am now teaching ceilidhs in Clare and elsewhere in Cambridge. I am also the Treasurer of the worldwide Society in its centenary year.

Summer evenings and weekends will generally find me on a cricket field as a qualified ECB umpire. One of the many highlights of my first year as Bursar was umpiring the Fellows and Staff vs Students match in June and I am enjoying coaching both the University women’s beginners as well as Staff in winter nets when the demands of Bursar permit.

Maria Tatulea-Codrean

I joined Clare as Lynden-Bell Research Fellow in Mathematics in October 2022, after one year as postdoctoral research associate at the Collège de France and Institut Curie in Paris. I was no stranger to Cambridge when I arrived, having completed my BA, MMath and PhD degrees in Mathematics at Trinity College, but the warm welcome I received at Clare made me instantly recognize the great privilege of joining such a vibrant community of students, fellows and staff!

My research is focused on building mathematical models for biology to advance our fundamental understanding of cellular processes and single-cell locomotion. I am particularly interested in solving problems that involve fluid flows, such as the swimming of microorganisms in the ocean or in complex environments like the human gut, with wide-ranging applications in the biomedical sciences, microbiology, and bioengineering. During my PhD, I developed theoretical models and simulations for the swimming of multiflagellated bacteria such as the key model organism Escherichia coli, a topic which I continue to explore in collaboration with experimentalists in the United States.

A current focus of my research aims to understand how microorganisms are capable of synchronizing their locomotory organelles — their ‘limbs’ — into well-coordinated swimming gaits analogous to the hopping of a kangaroo or the galloping of a cheetah, without any signalling from a central nervous system. For microorganisms, the coordination seems to be purely mechanical, but many aspects of synchronization remain poorly understood. Alongside my research, I also enjoy supervising Clare undergraduates in various Applied Mathematics subjects, and I mentor students undertaking research projects and extended essays in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Matthew Kenzie

In the spring I re-joined the Clare fellowship after four years at the University of Warwick. I was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare between 2016 and 2019, and am delighted to be back, seemingly having timed my return perfectly to avoid the upheavals in college due to COVID and building renovations.

My research field is experimental particle physics and I have moved my research group over to the Cavendish High Energy Physics group. My predominant research interests involve searching for, and measuring, CP violation -- a violation of the symmetry between matter and anti-matter. This subtle symmetry breaking effect has dramatic consequences regarding our own existence and the evolution of the Universe. I exploit data taken at the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment at CERN in order to make precision tests which are highly sensitive to new types of fundamental particles.

I am the holder of an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship. I also hold an ERC Starter Grant for the “KstarKstar” project.

Regarding teaching activities, my responsibilities as an Associate Professor in Data Intensive Science include teaching the “Principles of Data Science” module on the new inter-disciplinary MPhil program in Data Intensive Science. I will also be one of the two post-graduate tutors for Michaelmas and Lent terms whilst Maciej Dunajski is on leave. I have already very much enjoyed returning to the stroke side of the Fellows rowing crew and participating in the annual Clare staff vs students cricket match.