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Research FellowshipsCurrent holders of Research Fellowships
We normally elect two Research Fellows each year - one each in the Sciences and in Arts and Humanities. We currently have five JRFs in the Fellowship:
- D'Maris Coffman (Economic History, 2008 Mary Bateson Research Fellow)
- Joanne Taylor (Experimental Psychology, 2010 Constance Work Research Fellow)
- Bianca Gaudenzi (History, 2011 Dorothy Cohen Research Fellow)
- Susan Haines (Physics, 2011 Beatrice Mary Dale Research Fellow)
- Lina Klintberg (Physics, 2012 Old Students' Jubilee Research Fellow)
- Emma Pomeroy ( Arch & Anth, 2012 Henry Sidgwick Research Fellow)
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D'Maris Coffman
D'Maris Coffman received her MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania and her BSc in Economics from the Wharton School. She is currently the Mary Bateson Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she is revising her dissertation, entitled The Fiscal Revolution of the Interregnum: Excise Taxation in the British Isles, 1643-1683, for publication as a monograph. She is also working on a second book entitled Bubbles, Manias, and Market Failures: Financial Instability from Tulips to Subprime, which investigates how and when ‘asset-priced bubbles’ have acquired the status of the ‘exception that proves the rule’ of ‘rational and efficient markets.’ She argues for a more robust theory of financial markets that sees these events as an integral to their functioning. Her audience is both other academics and the educated public. Future research projects involve a study of the origins of claims about ‘transparency’ in public accounting and on the collection and consumption of revenue statistics by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century British states. Dr Coffman also directs the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College and serves as an affiliated Lecturer in the History Faculty where she lectures on the development of financial capitalism to postgraduate students. She is on the Board of Managers of Cambridge Finance. Dr Coffman interrupted the final year of her research fellowship in 2011-2012 to serve as director of studies and college lecturer in History at Newnham. In her free time, she enjoys skiing, kayaking, travel and theatre. |
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Joanne Taylor
Jo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. She is currently funded by an interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Medical Research and Economic and Social Research Councils. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2009, and was supervised by Professors Kate Nation and Kim Plunkett. For her PhD research she developed a new method for investigating reading acquisition in which adults learn to read new words written in unfamiliar symbols – an artificial orthography. She discovered that we are able to extract spelling-sound patterns through exposure to whole words and their pronunciations. We are then able to generalize and read further sets of new words written in the same artificial script. She also found that if we are familiar with what the new words sound like or what they mean, it helps us when we subsequently learn to read them. In her current experiments she is working with Dr Matt Davis, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand what the brain is doing when it learns to read new words. She is currently the Constance Work Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. |
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Bianca Gaudenzi
Born in Florence, Italy, Bianca got her first degree in MML at the University of Florence and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and later completed an MPhil in Modern European History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She received her PhD from Cambridge with a dissertation on the development of modern advertising in Italy and Germany during the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships, which she is now revising for publication. Over the course of her Ph.D. she was elected Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, and JWT Fellow at Duke University, NC. She is currently the Dorothy Cohen Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her research interests cover the social and cultural history of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the history of consumption and its political implications, the history of media and communications and the evolution of women’s role and representation during the 20th century. Future research projects include the analysis of the commercialisation of the Führer and the Duce in the interwar years and a comparative study of the emergence of the concept of consumer citizenship in Italy and West Germany in the years leading to the ‘economic miracle’. Her extracurricular interests comprise an unreserved fondness for European cinema, theatre, opera - she’s Italian after all! -, swimming and travelling.
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Susan is an experimental particle physicist. As an undergraduate, she read Natural Sciences (experimental and theoretical physics) at Cambridge; this was followed by a PhD in the High Energy Physics group at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. She is currently the Beatrice Mary Dale Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, and is a member of the LHCb experimental collaboration, carrying out her research with data provided by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Her research concerns the precision measurement of certain aspects of a phenomenon called CP violation. CP violation is important in explaining the differences in behaviour between matter and antimatter, and therefore the dominance of matter over antimatter in the Universe we observe today.
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Lina Klintberg
Lina took her MSci in Physics from the University of Bristol, and she received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, working within the field of quantum matter at the Cavendish. She studied superconductors and quantum critical materials by investigating their Fermi surfaces across magnetic or structural phase transitions. In particular, she developed techniques to study de Haas-van Alphen and Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations at ultra-high pressures. She did this, using some of the highest magnetic fields and lowest temperatures achievable on earth.
Lina currently works within the field of quantum optics looking at optically active defects in diamond. These defects are particularly interesting as they can act as quantum bits: a key component for the quantum computers of the future. By coupling the defects to micrometer sized mechanical resonators she studies the, as of yet, almost unexplored boundary where the unpredictable and counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics meets the everyday classical world we all know and love.
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Emma Pomeroy
Emma is currently the Henry Sidgwick Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is conducting her post-doctoral research as a member of Jay Stock’s PAVE group in the Division of Biological Anthropology, where she completed her PhD in 2012. Her main research interests are in human morphological variation in relation to the natural and social environments, and her PhD research focussed on archaeological and modern inhabitants of the Andes. Having received a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge and an MA in Osteoarchaeology from the University of Southampton, Emma worked on archaeological research excavations in South America, as an osteoarchaeologist in the UK commercial sector and in epidemiological research.
On returning to Cambridge to begin an AHRC-funded PhD, she combined these interests to pursue an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the divide between research on archaeological and living human populations. The results of her PhD give novel insight into the influence of stress exposure during growth (e.g. poor nutrition/health, hypoxia) on body proportions, with implications for understanding the evolutionary nature of trade-offs in growth, inferring the impacts of the social change on living conditions in the past, and understanding known associations between body proportions and adult disease risk. Her post-doctoral work aims to elucidate the impacts of different stressors and the timing of stress exposure on morphology in modern populations, and to continue applying these results to understanding past societies. |
Research Fellows who left recently to move on to new posts:
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Nina works in nanomagnetism and spintronics in the TFM group at the Cavendish laboratory. She researches advanced materials and heterostructures, trying to find suitable candidates for novel electronic devices. Her interest lies in (spin-)transport in low-dimensional heterostructures . For her PhD she used polarised neutron reflectometry and X-ray diffractions to assess the influence of structural details on the magnetism in thin film magnetic heterostructures, particularly Fe16N2 thin films and oxide based tunnel structures. Her current work focuses on the recently discovered tunnelling anisotropic magnetoresistance effect and its potential for new magnetic memory devices (specifically magnetic random access memory).
Nina fabricates her samples using molecular beam epitaxy and she likes to investigate her samples using a variety of experiments including polarised neutron reflectometry, X-ray reflectometry and diffraction, SQUID, (AC)-MOKE magnetometry and Magnetoresistance measurements.
She held currently the Ruth Holt Research Fellowship from 2009 to 2012, before moving on to a research position at the ISIS neutron spallation source, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
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Raphaële received her PhD in early Modern French from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on knowledge of nature in early modern France. In her doctoral dissertation, she studied the ways in which scholastic logic combined with humanist rhetoric provided the argumentative tools used to assess some of the main cosmological and cosmographical theses of the Scientific Revolution in a variety of vernacular French sources. Her corpus included Neo-Latin scholastic textbooks on logic and natural philosophy, vernacular cosmographies, natural theologies and cosmological fictions.
Her current project investigates early modern encyclopaedias on natural knowledge and consists of a case-study of Simon Goulart's Annotations et commentaires sur la Sepmaine de Du Bartas (first published in Geneva in 1581).'
She held the Associates' Research Fellowship from 2009 to 2012, before moving on to take up a post as Research Associate at the University of Western Australia.
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Louise Tillin
Louise Tillin is a political scientist with expertise in South Asia and Development Studies. She received her BA (Hons) from Cambridge, MA from the University of Pennsylvania and studied for her DPhil at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex. Her broad research interests include Indian politics and political economy, federalism and decentralisation, state-society relations and the politics of ethnicity. She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation about the creation of new states within India’s federal system as a book manuscript, provisionally entitled Changing States: The Politics of Borders in India (under contract with Hurst & Co). She is also developing a new piece of research about political regimes and rural political economy in India. She is a former South Asia analyst in BBC News, speaks Hindi and taught at the University of Sussex, LSE, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Open University. She held the Joyce Lambert Research Fellowship in Politics at Newnham College, Cambridge in 2010/11. Louise left Newnham in August 2011 to take up a Lectureship in Politics at the India Institute, King's College, London.
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Hannah Clarke
Hannah took a BSc (Hons) in Neuroscience at Cardiff, followed by a PhD in Cambridge at Downing College. She held the Amy Whiteley Research Fellowship from 2006 until 2010. Her research focuses on how the distinct brain neurochemicals modulate the functions of the prefrontal cortex and the fronto-striatal loops. These brain regions are known to be compromised in many psychiatric disorders such as depression,schizophrenia and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. Furthermore evidence suggests that in these disease states, distinct neurochemicals may contribute to distinct behavioural abnormalities/symptoms. "My work therefore uses animal models to identify which behavioural abnormalities are linked to which chemicals,and where in the brain this modulation is occurring. Her aim is to increase our understanding of the biochemical basis of the these psychiatric disordersin a way which will hopefully lead to the development of new drug treatments". |
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Camilla Hinde
Camilla took her Master's degree in Ecology at University of Wales, Bangor, followed by a PhD in Animal Behaviour at Cambridge.
She held a Junior Research Fellowship at Newnham from 2007 until 2010. She is interested in all aspects of evolution and animal behaviour, and her research focuses primarily on parental care in birds. She uses laboratory and field experiments to investigate the conflicts of interest within avian families. Camilla has moved on to a Senior Post Doctoral Associate position at the Edward Grey Institute, Department of Zoology, Oxford, where she is investigating social networks in birds.
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Delphine Mordey
Delphine completed her BA and Master of Studies in Music at St Peter’s College, Oxford, followed by a PhD at King’s College Cambridge, under the supervison of Professor Roger Parker. Drawing on archival materials, her current research focuses on the use of music during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870-1871), and the impact that these events had on French musicians. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the legacy of this period in French culture, as well as to ways of thinking about the role of music during and after periods of public trauma, and the relationship between music and politics more generally. Her most recent article is ‘Auber’s Horses: L’année terrible and apocalyptic narratives’, published in 19th-Century Music. Delphine is a member of the Network in Francophone Music Criticism, 1789 – 1914.
While holding her Research Fellowship (2007 - 2010), Delphine also directed studies in Music. She continues as Director of Studies in Music and is also Director of Music at Newnham.
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