Welcome to New Fellows in College

Trinity is pleased to welcome a number of new Fellows to college for this academic year, representing a wide range of subjects and expertise.

Professor David Parker is Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science. His research is in formal verification, which is a rigorous approach for checking that computerised systems function correctly and safely. He leads the development of a widely used software tool called PRISM, used for verifying probabilistic systems. He was previously Professor Computer Science at the University of Birmingham for over ten years.

Dr Alison Andrew is Tutorial Fellow in Economics. She is a development and labour economist, with research interests in the economics of gender, marriage, health and education; her current research focuses on India, Colombia and the UK.  She joins Trinity from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, where she was a Senior Research Economist.

Dr Katherine Backler is a Career Development Fellow in Ancient History. Her research has two related strands; firstly, to recover the perspectives and experiences of ancient women, and to reconsider how we might access those perspectives. Secondly, working outwards from the study of individual relationships to re-examine larger-scale social structures. Katherine completed her DPhil at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and joins us from All Souls College where she was an Examination Fellow.

Zoe Walker is Career Development Fellow in Philosophy. She works on various philosophical issues surrounding humour, comedy and joking. She has general research interests in Aesthetics, Ethics, and Philosophy of Language, and the intersections between them. She recently completed her PhD at Cambridge University.

Dr Gautam Gurung is Junior Research Fellow in Physics. His research is focused on computational materials science for exploring the properties of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials (with collinear or noncollinear magnetic moment arrangement) relevant to spintronics. AFM materials can be used as the principal component to design ultrafast, robust and dense spintronic devices in AFM spintronics. Dr Gurung joins Trinity from the University of Nebraska, where he was a postdoctoral researcher.

Dr Meia Walravens is Junior Research Fellow in History. She is an historian of the late medieval and early modern Islamic world, particularly research on elite community formation around authors of epistolary collections in the fifteenth-century Persianate world. She is working on her  first monograph demonstrating the influence of transregional intellectual and family networks over the diplomatic relations of the Bahmani sultanate in Deccan India. She joins Trinity having completed a PhD in History at the University of Antwerp. She also has degrees in South Asian Area Studies at SOAS University of London (MA, 2015) and Arabic and Islamic Studies at KU Leuven (MA, 2014).

Dr Chris Nicholls is Junior Research Fellow in Engineering. His research focuses on fluidic devices; these are valves with no moving parts that have great potential in controlling fluid flows in aircraft – from controlling aerodynamics, to active management of engine cooling, to modulating the supply of hydrogen for flame stability. His recent work has included developing a new kind of fluidic device that produces an oscillating fluid jet. Dr Nicholls  studied engineering as an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford, then moved to Lincoln College for a DPhil in active flow control.

Dr Krisztina Ilko is Junior Research Fellow in the History of Art; she also holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of History. Her previous research focused on medieval Italy and the peninsula’s interconnectivity with the rest of the globe. Her current project, ‘The Pawns of History: A New Approach Towards the Global Middle Ages,’ uses the game of chess and surviving chess pieces to find a tangible approach towards the global medieval past. Dr Ilko joins Trinity from Cambridge University, where the served as an Affiliated Lecturer and  completed her PhD.

These new College Fellows are joined by Dr Neale Marlow as Lecturer in Clinical Medicine – a new post for the college. He coordinates college-based support for Trinity’s clinical medicine students who have completed the pre-clinical medicine degree and are continuing with their clinical studies at Trinity. Dr Marlow leads a team of clinical advisors and mentors for students to consult for guidance on the practical aspects of the course.

Trintiy’s Senior Tutor, Dr Rebecca Bullard, says: ‘We are delighted to welcome these new Fellows to Trinity. They represent a wide range of different disciplines and demonstrate Trinity’s commitment to subjects from across the arts and the sciences. We are especially excited to welcome so many early career researchers to the College. We are proud to be supporting the next generation of scholars, and we benefit greatly from their contributions to our academic community.’