Academic Dean's Report

Rebecca Lawson, Ignas Budvytis, André Cabrera Serrenho, Ian Burrows and Julija Krupic have joined the College as official Fellows. Ian and Julija have moved from being Bye-Fellows and continue to teach English and Neuroscience respectively. Rebecca, who is a lecturer in the Psychology Department and directs studies for Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, has just won a Lister Institute research prize for her work in computational psychiatry. Ignas, an expert in computer vision and robotics, is a lecturer in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory and is teaching Engineering using his skills with indirect deep structured learning. André, who has been leading our College Research Associates for several years, has now become a University Lecturer in Engineering, Environment and Sustainable Development. He will be working on climate change mitigation whilst teaching Engineering.

Two new Research Fellows have been elected: Fred Smith is a historian of early modern religion who is studying perceptions of radicalism in Britain, building on his experience as a primary school teacher. Tianyi Zhang is a theologian and an expert on Suhrawardi’s illuminationist philosophy and Plato’s cave. After a blink of geological time as Denman Baynes Senior Student, Sam Wimpenny has become a Research Fellow.
Nick Evans, Research Fellow in History, has taken his expertise in Byzantium, the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe to a lectureship at King’s College, London. Simon Buczacki, Director of Studies in pre-clinical Medicine, has moved to Oxford as the Richard Blackwell Pharsalia Professor of Colorectal Surgery and a Fellow of Linacre College. We will miss their contributions to the College.

Within the Fellowship, there have been a series of promotions: Rodrigo Cacho has become Professor of Early Modern Iberian and Latin American Literature, Maciej Dunajski has become Reader in Mathematical Physics and Heike Laman has become Reader in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Giancarlo Corsetti and Polly O’Hanlon have been elected Fellows of the British Academy. Nigel Weiss, who was the first President of the Fellowship, a Fellow of Clare for more than fifty years, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Astrophysics, died in June and his obituary is elsewhere in the Review.

Several Fellows have taken academic leave this year to enable them to spend time focusing on their research. Phil Allmendinger has been looking at the impact of digital technology on cities. Neil Andrews has been looking at controversies in contracts. Bill Byrne has been developing methods of machine translation and natural language generation. Lucy Colwell continues to work with Google investigating protein structure. Giancarlo Corsetti has been both Duisenberg Fellow at the European Central Bank and visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Tamara Follini has continued working with The Wings of the Dove and the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. Marta Lahr has restricted herself to the last million years of fossils in northern Kenya. Richard Phillips has been considering electron-phonon interactions and spin-momentum locking.