The College’s Research Associate (RA) Scheme offers short-term collegiate affiliation to postdoctoral researchers and others in similar posts at Cambridge. The RA Scheme offers an opportunity for involvement in the intellectual and social life of the College. RAs are primarily based at Leckhampton, the principal home of our postgraduate community, where a range of lectures and research events are held across the academic year. Leckhampton’s extensive grounds include a dining hall, where informal dinners are served most nights of the week, the College’s playing fields and gym, a music room, and, not least, its famous and extensive gardens. 

CURRENT RESEARCH ASSOCIATES

Dr Christina Boukouvala is a materials scientist with a background in engineering and in her research she studies light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. To understand how nanostructures interact with light she employs both computational and experimental techniques, including electromagnetic simulations, single particle spectroscopies and microscopies as well as nanoparticle shape modelling approaches. Currently, she is particularly interested in exploring the potential of magnesium nanoparticles as a sustainable platform for sensing applications, and especially for enhanced spectroscopies.

Dr Sam Crawshaw is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Pathology. He conducted his PhD research with Prof. John Carr in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His PhD work focused on the interactions of the cucumber mosaic virus 2b protein with the viral 1a and host Argonaute 1 proteins and the consequences of these interactions on the induction of aphid resistance and symptom severity in infected plants. He is currently working in the group of Dr Betty Chung investigating the mechanisms by which the efficiency of translation of mRNA sequences, rather than their abundance, is altered in response to pathogens (such as Salmonella).

Dr Harriet Fagerberg Her research interests are in the philosophy of science, in particular biology, medicine, neuroscience and psychology. Prior to commencing a PhD in Philosophy on King’s College London and Humboldt University’s joint PhD programme, Harriet completed an MA in Philosophy of Psychology at KCL and a BA in Philosophy, Psychology and Politics at Maastricht University College. Her PhD thesis – entitled ‘Disease, Dysfunction and the Brain’ – defended a new theory of pathology as a special kind of biological dysfunction, and applied it to the brain. Since graduating from her PhD, Harriet has held  fellowships at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the London School of Economics and Political Science. At Cambridge, Harriet will be Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her project is titled ‘What makes psychiatric disorders special? Understanding dysfunctions of highly neuroplastic traits’.  

Dr Nada Farag is a Royal Society Newton Fellow at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. She earned her PhD in 2023 from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in Italy, where she investigated how DNA repair enzymes regulate the structural organization of polymeric systems built from DNA.

Currently, Nada leverages the principles of nucleic acid nanotechnology to design advanced biomimetic systems. Her research focuses on addressing challenges in biomedicine and cancer diagnostics by developing sensing tools capable of monitoring and quantifying critical biomarkers, such as proteins and fragments of DNA and RNA.

Dr Bruno Marinič earned his DPhil in Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Tim Donohoe, where he worked on developing new dearomatisation reactions of N-heterocycles. He is currently a Career Development Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, working in the group of Prof. John Sutherland FRS. His current research is interested in elucidating the origin of life. More specifically he is focused on developing prebiotically plausible systems that would allow for the assembly of RNA from monomeric building blocks.

Dr Lorcán Pigott-Dix is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He completed his PhD at the Earlham Institute in 2023, where he developed biodata curation tools to extract semantic metadata from scientific literature using natural language processing and deep learning. Currently, he develops deep learning-based tools for genomic analysis within a clinical paediatric oncology research group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. This includes the development of a single-read mutation classifier aimed at enabling the assessment of mutation signatures with greater sensitivity than previously possible from a standard 30x coverage whole genome. Outside of his clinical focus, Lorcán also maintains a strong interest in developing substrate-agnostic tools for studying evolution, whether biological or cultural.

Dr Zhexin (Eric) Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He completed his Dr. rer. nat (PhD) in Germany at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in 2022. Eric’s research focuses on understanding complicated biological systems using advanced in situ electron microscopy. During his doctoral studies, he developed a workflow using cryo focused-ion-beam (cryo-FIB) milling and electron cryo-tomography (cryo-ET) to image muscle fibres. Using these techniques, he revealed the delicate muscle structures essential for contraction and involved in muscle diseases. Currently, Eric is studying how pathogenic bacteria form multicellular communities called biofilms. Biofilm is a common lifestyle of bacteria where bacteria cells are embedded in a matrix that protects them against external threats. This often leads to chronic infections that do not have an effective chemical treatment so far. He aims to unravel the detailed molecular landscape of the biofilm using high-resolution in situ imaging, which is a key step towards the development of antimicrobial therapies.

Dr David Yallup is a postdoc in the Department of Physics, based in the Kavli Institute for Cosmology. His research career started with a PhD in particle physics from UCL, where he was a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. During this time he worked mostly on the interface between theory and experiment, developing tools to interpret the LHC results in novel ways. His next career step was switching fields from physics on the very smallest scale to the largest, joining the Cosmology group in Cambridge in 2021. In Cambridge David works with the world leading inference group within Cambridge Cosmology, focusing on the art (and science) of inference and modelling across the world of fundamental physics. His current main topics of interest are in Bayesian Machine Learning and explainable AI, with applications ranging from industrial challenges to fundamental science at both the biggest and smallest known scales in physics.