St Cross College, Oxford

The following 'pen portraits' of new fellows were available at the time of going to press.

David M Anderson comes to St Cross as University Lecturer in African Politics, having already spent the previous three years as a Research Fellow in African Studies, based at St Antony's College. His Oxford connections began in 2002, when he was elected to the Evans-Pritchard Visiting Lectureship at All Souls. He first studied History at the University of Sussex, going on to begin doctoral studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1978, after which he took up a Research Fellowship at New Hall, Cambridge. In 1984 he was appointed Lecturer in Imperial & Commonwealth History at Birkbeck College, University of London, moving just a few hundred yards across Bloomsbury in 1990 to become Senior Lecturer in African History, and then Director of the Centre for African Studies in the University of London (1997-2001). His research interests have remained focused upon eastern and central Africa, but his published work has ranged across a wide variety of topics, from histories of environmental change to current analysis of political violence. His most recent book is Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), and the results of his recently completed ESRC project, The Khat Controversy: Stimulating the Drugs Debate, will be published by Berg in 2006.

Jo Ashbourn read Chemistry at Oxford before changing fields to obtain a PhD in Plasma Physics. She has held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship followed by a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellowship. Her current research is focused on theoretical aspects of solar physics phenomena as well as a study of dusty plasmas and the creation of novel nanoparticles in high energy plasmas. She is also the organiser of the University's annual Science Writing Competition which aims to promote the public understanding of science to the wider Oxfordshire community. She presently combines her research post at St Cross with the role of Director of IT for the College.

Colin Dexter was born in Stamford, Lincs, in 1930, winning a scholarship to Stamford School in 1941, where he studied Latin and Greek in the Classical Sixth. He did his National Service in the Royal Signals (as a high speed Morse operator!) before going up to Christ's College, Cambridge to read Classics. From 1953 to 1966 he taught Latin and Greek in the Midlands (Leicester, Loughborough, Corby), and was appointed to the University's Schools Examination Board in 1966, where he supervised O, A and S level exams in Classics and English, until his retirement in 1988.

He had been co-author of three General Studies text-books in the 60s (published by Robert Maxwell!), with his first work of fiction, featuring the beer-drinking, crossword-solving Detective Inspector Morse, published in 1975. There followed great success for the subsequent Morse investigations: and 33 episodes were televised between 1987 and 2000 with John Thaw as Morse and Kevin Whately as Lewis.

He has been awarded many honours, including the coveted Diamond Dagger for services to crime-writing, an OBE for services to literature and the freedom of the City of Oxford.

In his younger days he was a keen hockey and tennis player but he does not wish to see any further cricket if it is as nerve-racking as the latest Ashes series. In the crossword world he has, on several occasions, been the national or joint-national champion during the Ximenes and Azed eras, and his two fictional characters were named after two of his arch rivals in the field: Sir Jeremy Morse and Mrs B. Lewis. He lists his hobbies as reading the poets, listening to Wagner and solving crosswords.

Margret Frenz read European and South Asian History at the University of Heidelberg. She did her PhD on the transition to British rule in Malabar, South India, in the late 18th and early 19th century. Thereafter, she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin. In October 2004, she joined St Cross College as a Junior Research Fellow. She was attached to Centre on Migration, Policy and Society as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She currently undertakes research on the multiple migration movements of Goans across the Indian Ocean and beyond it. She is particularly interested in the interface between Modern European, South Asian and African History.

Heather Hamill grew up in Co Antrim N. Ireland and crossed the Irish Sea to read History at the University of St Andrews in 1989. She came to Oxford to do an MSc in Applied Social Studies and Social Work at Green College and thereafter practiced as a social worker whilst working as a researcher at the Centre for Criminological Research. She then went on to do a DPhil in the Department of Sociology looking at the relationship between the IRA and young offenders in Belfast, N Ireland. On completion of this in 2001 she moved to Nuffield College as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her work combines a theoretical interest in trust and signalling theory with an empirical interest in delinquency, organised crime and illegal organisations. Her most recent research examined the real-life trust dilemmas of taxi drivers and their customers in dangerous cities (see Streetwise: How taxi drivers establish their customers trustworthiness 2005 NY: Russell Sage Foundation with Diego Gambetta); and in 2006 she begins work on a project on recruitment into illegal organisations with a focus on the IRA, the Tamil Tigers and the Sicilian Mafia.

Maria Hoellerer was born in 1974 in Vienna, and grew up in a small town in the east of Austria. After attending the local high school she took a year out and went to Dublin, Ireland, to see what life might be like beyond the Austrian borders and improve her English. She returned to Austria in 1993 to study Biology/Genetics at the University of Vienna. After her graduation she felt it was time yet again to change location and field of interest and a Wellcome Trust 4-year DPhil studentship in structural biology at the University of Oxford enabled her to do both. The aim of her DPhil research was to understand the structural basis for interactions of proteins involved in cell adhesion. On completion of her DPhil she took up the E.P. Abraham Junior Research Fellowship at St Cross College in January 2005 in order to continue and extend her previous work at the Department of Biochemistry. Her current research focuses on the structural and functional characterisation of a small part of the complex protein interaction network that mediates cell adhesion and cell migration and thereby influences many biological processes ranging from embryonic development and wound repair to cancer metastasis.

Achillefs Kapanidis grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece and graduated from the School of Chemistry at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1991. After a MSc in Food Chemistry at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ, USA), he went on to do a PhD in Chemistry, also at Rutgers, where he studied gene transcription and gene activation using biochemical and biophysical approaches. After completing his doctorate in 1999, he moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for a post-doctoral position, and then to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), for an assistant researcher position. In both positions, he developed novel single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy methods and used them to study gene-transcription mechanisms and protein-protein interactions. In December 2004, he joined Oxford as a University Lecturer in Biological Physics and as an associate member of the Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Bionanotechnology; he is currently heading a group of physicists, chemists, and biologists that use single-molecule spectroscopy to study gene-expression mechanisms and DNA-based nanodevices.

Kun-Chin Lin was born in Taipei and raised in New York. He started his undergraduate education at Harvard as a mathematics major, but soon got sidetracked by the dirty fun of political science. He obtained his MA and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Kun-Chin studies the political economy of China's market transition, with recent publications on the emergence of corporate conglomerates controlled by the central state. In the past year, he received two British Academy grants in collaboration with Chinese and British scholars, for survey research on the relationships between land use rights, project financing, road building, and rural development. See the Blueprint, 17 Nov 2005, page 6, Oxford and China, for a mention. Kun-Chin stroked for the men's four for the joint St Cross-Wolfson rowing club, which competed in the final of the Oxford Regatta earlier this year. He has now retired to raise a new family.

Sloan Mahone completed her DPhil in Modern History in 2004 and returned to the United States to take up an Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship in the Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry program of Washington University in St Louis where she joined the faculties of History and African & African-American Studies. Missing Oxford terribly, she returned in September 2005 to take up a post as the first University Lecturer in the History of Medicine within the History Faculty. She also serves as the Deputy Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. In June 2005, she submitted a grant proposal to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (in tandem with David Anderson, University Lecturer in African Politics) for a new research project 'Trauma and Personhood in Late Colonial Kenya' which focuses upon a newly acquired medical and photographic archive from the estate of Dr. Edward Lambert Margetts, a psychiatrist working in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.

Dimitris Papanikolaou was born and raised in the Greek capital and studied Classics and Modern Greek at Athens. In recent years he has developed a profound nostalgia for the huge concrete buildings of that university, where thousands of students from all social classes were receiving free state education, while learning what it means to think freely and be socially active.
He came to England on a Greek state grant and did an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London. He held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies (UCL, 2002-2004). In October 2004 he succeeded Professor Peter Mackridge in the teaching of Modern Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Before focusing entirely on his academic career, he worked in a number of jobs, the most important of which were: secretary, waiter, DJ, music reviewer, assistant librarian, musician, journalist and radio producer.
Published and forthcoming work includes a monograph on French and Greek songwriters (Singing Poets, Legenda), articles on Greek literature and politics, queer theory, and cinema. He is currently working on a reading of the poet C.P.Cavafy informed by the study of sexuality.

Doug Parr grew up near Chester before reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge and doing a DPhil in Chemistry of the Atmosphere in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford University. Following a short post-doc he moved to Friends of the Earth and then Greenpeace in 1994. He is now chief Scientific Adviser to Greenpeace in UK and his duties include supervision of the science and information functions inside the organization. Topics of interest and engagement have been climate change, energy and nuclear power, ocean protection, nanotechnology and GMOs.

Lee Sweetlove grew up in Portsmouth and read Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia in 1988. He then went on to do a PhD in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His PhD was supervised by the late Prof. Tom ap Rees, one of the leading figures in Plant Biochemistry research of the last 40 years. Lee investigated the regulation of the biosynthesis of starch in plants. In 1995, Lee began a period of postdoctoral research at the Department of Plant Sciences in Oxford which culminated in him being awarded a five-year David Phillips Research Fellowship by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to set up his own research group at Oxford. He has accepted the offer of a lectureship at the Department of Plant Sciences which he will take up in October 2006 upon completion of his research fellowship. His research focusses on the metabolic response of plants to variations in environmental conditions. This research is particularly important given the negative impact that global climate change will have on the performance of the current varieties of our staple crop plants. He is particularly interested in generating mathematical models of the extremely complex metabolic network in plants and to use these models to understand how plants cope with stress as a result of environmental change.

Marzena Szymanska grew up in Warsaw, Poland. She read Physics at Warsaw University of Technology, where she graduated with a first class Magister degree in 1998. For her final year project, she spent a year at King's College London working in the Quantum Optics group on photonic band gap lasers. In October 1998 she joined Trinity College, Cambridge and Theoretical Condensed Matter group at Cavendish Laboratory to work with Professor P. B. Littlewood for her PhD degree on novel coherent states of matter, called Bose-Einstein condensates, in semiconductor low-dimensional structures. During her PhD research she spent some time at Bell Laboratories in the USA, involved in a development of quantum wire excitonic lasers. She submitted her PhD thesis in October 2001 and was elected to a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in January 2002. In 2004 she was awarded an EPSRC fellowship in Theoretical Physics to work in Professor Keith Burnett Theory Group at Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. She investigates coherence effects in solids, in particular Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons and polaritons; optical properties of low dimensional semiconductor structures; non-equilibrium condensation and Keldysh field theory; dilute atomic Fermi gases - Feshbach resonances and BCS-BEC crossover.

Madhav Thambisetty is a neurologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) in King's College, London. After qualifying as a doctor in Calicut, India, he won a Felix scholarship to read for a DPhil in Clinical Pharmacology at Green College, Oxford. He then trained as a neurologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. After sub-speciality training in cognitive neurology, he served on Emory's neurology faculty before moving to London, where he now holds a research fellowship from the Alzheimer's Society. His research interests focus on understanding the biology of Alzheimer's disease with a view to developing effective diagnostic tests for early disease detection. In his current research at the IoP, he combines the emerging techniques of proteomics with neuroimaging to identify biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. In collaboration with the Oxford Project To Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA), he is also interested in studying the epidemiology of dementia in the developing world and has received funding support from the British Academy to establish a specialised memory clinic in Bangalore, India. An avid cricketer, he writes an occasional cricket column for the popular website, Rediff.com.

Oliver Watson took a BA in Classic Arabic and Islamic Studies at Durham University before becoming a student of Professor Geza Fehervari at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1971. His PhD Persian Lustre Tiles of the 13th and 14th Centuries was awarded in 1977. In 1972-3 he was a Fellow of the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran and from 1975-7 acted as a curator for the Arts of Islam exhibition at the Hayward gallery in London. In 1979 he was appointed Assistant Keeper for Islamic Art in the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and was made Head of the Ceramics Department in 1989. In 2001 he was made Chief Curator of the Middle Eastern Collections in the V and A, and after two years working on secondment in Qatar, left in 2005 to take up the post of Keeper of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Islamic art, particularly on ceramics, on which subject he has written two books: Persian Lustre Ware (London, 1985) and Ceramics from Islamic Lands (London, 2005). He has also published on contemporary studio ceramics, a specialism he took up at the Victoria and Albert Museum.