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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:
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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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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 will interrupt 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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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 is currently the Ruth Holt Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.
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Raphaële received her PhD in early Modern French from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge. She is currently the Associates' Research Fellow at Newnham College, 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).'
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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. |
Research Fellows who left recently to move on to new posts:
- Louise Tillin (Politics, 2010 Joyce Lambert Research Fellow)
- Hannah Clarke (2006, Amy Whiteley Research Fellow, 2006 - 2010)
- Camilla Hinde (Animal behaviour, Wheldale Onslow Research Fellow, 2007 - 2010)
- Delphine Mordey (Music, Rosamond Harding Research Fellow, 2007 - 2010)
- Laura Beers (Political History, Dorothy Ray Cohen Research Fellow, 2008/09)
- Clare Galtrey (Neuroscience, Rosalind Franklin Research Fellow, 2008/09)
- Susanne Hakenbeck (Archaeology, Jenner Research Fellow, 2006-2009)
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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. My 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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Laura Beers
Laura Beers held the Dorothy Ray Cohen junior research fellowship in history for 2008/09. She arrived at Newnham from the Cambridge History Faculty, where she held a ESRC-funded research fellowship. Before that, she completed her PhD at Harvard University, and held fellowships at Warwick University and the Institute of Historical Research. Her research focuses on the political, social and cultural history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the relationship between politics and the media, and the integration of women into the political process after 1918. She is currently preparing the manuscript of her first book, Selling Socialism: Labour, Democracy and the Mass Media in Interwar Britain, for publication with Harvard University Press in 2010. The book expands on research discussed in her recent article in the Journal of British Studies , and in her contribution to The Foundations of the British Labour Party, edited by Matthew Worley (Ashgate, 2009). She is also undertaking research for her second book, tentatively titled What Women Want: Re-gendering Party Politics in Post World War I Britain. Research for this project is funded by the British Academy (SG 51480). Laura has now moved to a post as Assistant Professor at the American University in Washington, DC. |
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Clare Galtrey
Clare took a BA in Medical Sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge and went on to undertake a PhD and medical degree at Newnham. She held the Rosalind Franklin Research Fellowship for 2008/09. She combines clinical work as a doctor with research into the functional recovery of the brain after injury and stroke. She is interested in the mechanisms underlying this recovery and particular in investigating possible therapies that will enhance the ability of the central nervous system to recover. "The nervous system has the potential recover the function that was lost by reorganizing its connections, rather than repairing the damage. This capacity of the nervous system to adapt and reorganize is known as plasticity. Ultimately, if plasticity can be utilized it would improve the potential for functional recovery to the beneļ¬t of patients. In my research I use a variety of techniques including identification of the protein in the synapse involved in this plasticity and evaluation of possible therapies in various models." Clare has moved on to a clinical post at the Royal Surrey County Hospital. |
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Susanne Hakenbeck
Susanne took a BA in Archaelogy at Durham, followed by an MPhil and PhD in Cambridge, as a junior member of Newnham. She held the Jennery Research Fellowship from 2006 until 2009. Her research focuses on the social changes during the late Roman to early medieval transition on the European continent and in Britain. She is interested in migration and shifting identities in early medieval Bavaria, as reflected in changing burial practices. "I use a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on mortuary studies, a detailed knowledge of the material culture of the period and on techniques from archaeological science, in particular stable isotope analysis. My work considers the history and theoretical basis of concepts such as migrations, ethnicity, race, typology and archaeological cultures." Susanne has moved on to a Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton.
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