INT's Fellows' Event 2023
The Isaac Newton Trust was delighted to welcome its Fellows to the Postdoc Centre at Eddington on Friday 26 May 2023!
Isaac Newton Fellows who attended included INT/College Junior Research Fellows, Academic Career Development Fellows, a Humboldt Fellow and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellows. Isaac Newton Fellows enjoyed the opportunity to network with each other and to present and debate their research. Fellows' presentations focussed on an extremely wide range of research subjects including: gendered energy and space use; machine learning and the criminal justice system; how to escape from a black hole; Latin American Textile Art; how to make a tube of cells; and reconstructing ash dispersal from historical volcanic eruptions.
INT Fellows' Event Schedule 2023
*New* INT Academic Career Development Fellowships
The Isaac Newton Trustees have launched a new model for Early Career Fellowships.
In partnership with Faculties in the Schools of Arts & Humanities and Humanities & Social Sciences and with three pilot Colleges, we have developed INT Academic Career Development Fellowships that offer career development for early career researchers combining Faculty and College teaching and mentoring with protected research time.
Two INT Academic Career Development Fellows take up their posts in October 2022:
Dr Cicely Whiteley in Philosophy, with Magdalene & Newnham Colleges;
Dr Franziska Strack in Politics of the Environment, with Lucy Cavendish College
These two ACD Fellowships are a pilot for a potential programme; the INT will shortly issue a call for new Faculty/College partnerships to come forwards for up to three Fellowships in Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences to start in October 2023.
Dr Bipasha Chakraborty a Leverhulme Trust and INT Early Career Fellow has been awarded the 2021 Atos and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre's Joseph Fourier Prize for her research project ‘Quantum Computation of Quantum Field Theories’.
The competition is aimed at supporting innovative work in the field of quantum computing and encourages academics and industrial scientists in quantum computing to submit their research proposals for a chance to win €10,000 to support their work.
Dr. Chakraborty’s research has already produced some of the first digital QC algorithms to solve complex QFTs with sign problems, and the Joseph Fourier Prize will support her work in creating pathways for digital QCs of even more complex QFTs, such as in Quantum Chromodynamics.
Dr Harry Cliff, PDRA on a recent INT grant, works on CERN’s LHCb experiment, where he is searching for telltale signs of new particles or forces by studying the decays of exotic particles called ‘beauty quarks’. Alongside his research, he is also an active populariser of science, and had his first popular science book published by Picador in the UK and Doubleday in the USA in August 2021. Titled, How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch - In Search Of The Recipe For Our Universe, the book tells the story of science’s ongoing quest to understand the nature and origins of matter, from 18th century experiments on guinea pigs to the latest clues emerging from the Large Hadron Collider.
*NEW* Isaac Newton Trust Widening Participation & Induction Fund
The INT Widening Participation and Induction Fund (WPIF) was launched on 29 March 2022 on the basis of a donation of £1.3m from Trinity College to provide resources for Colleges to support their work with prospective and incoming undergraduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as their teachers and their parents or guardians.
There will be two application deadlines per academic year, on 1 February and 1 June. The June 2022 round is now open.
Our Patron meets the Director and Early Career Fellows
His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales visited Homerton College on 23 November 2021 to celebrate the inauguration of the new Principal, Lord Simon Woolley and asked particularly to meet with the Director and four of the INT’s Early Career Fellows reflecting the diversity of research and background among the INT Fellows (L-R): Dr Lorna Dillon (Leverhulme INT Early Career Fellow in POLIS, Murray Edwards), Dr Rajesh Bhagat (Leverhulme INT Early Career Fellow in DAMTP, Darwin), Dr Rihab Khalid (INT Junior Research Fellow in Architecture, Lucy Cavendish) and Dr Godwin Aleku (Leverhulme INT Early Career Fellow in Biochemistry, Wolfson).
Mathelinda Nabugodi wins 2022 English Goethe Society’s Prize and £10k Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award 2021
Mathelinda Nabugodi has been awarded the English Goethe Society’s 2022 Publications of the English Goethe Society Prize for an outstanding article published in the journal in the previous year. The award is for the article, ‘The Contexts of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Faust Translations’, which appeared in PEGS 90.1 (2021), pp. 31–52. The editors who judged the prize stated that the, 'elegant article makes a significant contribution to Shelley scholarship, offering a subtle analysis of his determined labours of translation from the German and a wonderful case-study in his creative use of interlingual interferences'. The prize is accompanied by a cash award of £100. Read more >
This prize comes shortly after Mathelinda's winning the £10,000 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award for her "engaging and fascinating" work of non-fiction "The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive". This biennial prize is awarded to a first-time writer whose work demonstrates literary talent but who needs support to complete their first book. This can be fiction, non-fiction or short stories. Mathelinda is a Leverhulme Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English and a Postdoctoral Affiliate of Newnham College. Read more >
Artificial ‘brain’ reveals why we can’t always believe our eyes
Leverhulme INT Early Career Fellow, Dr Reuben Rideaux, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology A computer network closely modelled on part of the human brain is enabling new insights into the way our brains process moving images - and explains some perplexing optical illusions.
By using decades’ worth of data from human motion perception studies, Dr Reuben Rideaux and his research colleagues have trained an artificial neural network to estimate the speed and direction of image sequences.
The new system, called MotionNet, is designed to closely match the motion-processing structures inside a human brain. This has allowed the researchers to explore features of human visual processing that cannot be directly measured in the brain.
Their study, published in the Journal of Vision, uses the artificial system to describe how space and time information is combined in our brain to produce our perceptions, or misperceptions, of moving images.
A Great Recorded History
To mark the start of LGBTQ+ History Month, Leverhulme INT Early Career Fellow, Dr Diarmuid Hester reveals the people and places that have shaped queer life at Cambridge – and why he wanted to share their stories in his new Queer Cambridge Audio Trail, A Great Recorded History.
Cambridge has a rich and radical queer past. Over the years, the city has been an important hub of queer political organising and community-building for Cambridgeshire and the surrounding areas. The space of the city has likewise fed the imaginations of some of the most remarkable queer voices in British literature, including Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Ali Smith.
A Great Recorded History sets out to explore Cambridge’s queer past through its literature and politics. Featuring interviews with older members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community and excerpts from literature produced in the city, it gives listeners a chance to immerse themselves in the history of the place - and become part of it.