Our people

Charlotte is a palaeobiologist based at the Department of Earth Sciences in Cambridge. Her research focuses on the ecology and diversity of the first large, complex macro-organisms – the Ediacaran Biota – which include fossils of some of the earliest animals. Charlotte’s field areas include southern Namibia, central England, and Newfoundland (Canada). She is currently funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship and the Isaac Newton Trust. She is actively engaged in undergraduate teaching in the Department, and especially loves teaching on field courses.

Charlotte was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2016-2018, researching the ecology of marine meiofauna under mentorship of Prof. Duncan McIlroy. She completed her PhD at the Department of Earth Sciences in Cambridge under supervision of Prof. Nick Butterfield and Philip Wilby (British Geological Society), awarded in 2016. Before that, she gained her BA(Mod) in Geology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, graduating with a Gold Medal and high first class honours degree in 2011.

Dirk Jongkind has a business background in the horticultural sector in the Netherlands before he returned to academic study. In his doctoral work he studied the Codex Sinaiticus, an extremely old manuscript of the Greek Bible. After his doctorate in 2005 he was employed by the British Library in London in order to prepare the curatorial side of the Codex Sinaiticus Digitisation project. His specialisation is in the area of the Greek philology of the first century AD, including areas such as the study of inscriptions, papyri, and archaeology. He is the editor of a critical edition of the Greek New Testament which appeared in 2017.

He is keen to show that the language of the New Testament shows all the signs of being produced and used in a world that was just as dynamic and complex as ours. Though he has no problem supporting the English cricket and rugby teams, he cannot forget his Dutch roots when it comes to football. As an affiliated lecturer he teaches textual criticism and manuscripts in the Faculty of Divinity

Stephen Jenkins leads the Surface Science Group in the Department of Chemistry, directing research that explores the interaction of industrially and environmentally important molecules with reactive metals. Having gained his BSc and PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Exeter (1991 and 1995 respectively) Stephen held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Cambridge (2001-09) prior to his appointment as a University Lecturer in 2009 and promotion to Reader in 2014. He is currently Treasurer of the Royal Society of Chemistry Solid Surfaces Group and Rooms Tutor at St Edmund's College.  Author of nearly 150 peer-reviewed papers, Stephen's book on `Chirality at Solid Surfaces' was published by Wiley in 2018.

Dr Andy Harter CBE, DL, FREng, CEng, FIET, FBCS, CITP, FLCM, FRSA, read Mathematics and Computer Science at Fitzwilliam College. As a graduate student at Corpus Christi and the Computer Laboratory, he investigated designs for three-dimensional integrated circuits. His doctoral thesis was published by Cambridge University Press and is still available having been recently reprinted!

Since then he has been engaged in industrial research and development for communications systems, and was director of research and engineering of the AT&T Cambridge Laboratory. He has contributed extensively and significantly in the fields of distributed systems, ubiquitous and context aware computing, user-interface design and thin-client systems most notably VNC, a system that lets one person take over another person’s computer screen to help them fix problems. The software is now on over a billion devices, on more different kinds of computer than any other application and is even an official part of the internet. The software is also embedded in Intel Chips, Apple Desktops, Google Software, mobile phones and cars.

Andy is a Fellow of the Computer Laboratory involved with graduate student research programmes, and lectures to final year undergraduates. He is the founder and CEO of RealVNC, a highly successful Cambridge software company which in 2013 won its third Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in three years. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2010, he received the Academy’s Silver Medal, and in 2013 the MacRobert Award, the most prestigious UK prize for engineering and commercialisation. In 2016 he was awarded the Faraday Medal, the highest honour of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and gave the 2018 Turing Lecture. He is a trustee of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, The Computer History Museum and Britten Sinfonia. He is a Chair of Cambridge Network and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded a CBE in the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours.  He is a Deputy Lieutenant of the County and was appointed by HM The Queen as the High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire for 2018-19.

At St Edmund's Andy has been a Tutor, Director of Studies in Computer Science, Senior Treasurer of the May Ball and Family officer. He is married to Lily and they are kept busy with their young family. Other interests include golf, rowing, gardening and music, particularly the piano and organ, for which Andy is a Fellow of the London College of Music. He also enjoys travel, and has ventured in a single-engined light aircraft to Iceland, Greenland, Northern Canada (to within a few hundred miles of the North Pole), North and South America (crossing the Andes, rounding Cape Horn and visiting the Falkland Islands).

Matt Harris graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences, specialising in Pharmacology, from the University of Cambridge in 2015. With the support of a BBSRC doctoral training programme studentship, he completed his PhD in 2019, also at the University of Cambridge. His thesis investigated the pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptors involved in insulin secretion and the development of small molecule modulators. Matt is currently a post-doctoral research associate in the laboratory of Dr. Graham Ladds in the Department of Pharmacology. His research focuses on the role of accessory proteins in modulating G protein-coupled receptor signalling.

Antonina J. Kruppa BA PhD, originally from Germany, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College, USA in 2007. Supported by a Wellcome Trust PhD Studentship, she obtained her PhD at Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 2012 investigating an enzyme that protects from the toxicity of plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. She then undertook post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Dr Folma Buss (2013-2023) working on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases. Antonina’s research utilized a wide variety of microscopy techniques to understanding the role of molecular motor proteins and the cytoskeleton in regulating mitochondrial homeostasis and was funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the British Heart Foundation and Alzheimer’s Research UK. She is now the Biological Microscopy Coordinator for the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) where she is working at the user:facility interface to facilitate access to microscopy facilities across Departments within SBS, creating links with experts for bespoke imaging setups housed in the Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre (CAIC), and building a wider microscopy community across Cambridge.

Dr Kevin Loudon obtained his MBBS in 2008 and completed his specialist medical training in renal and internal medicine in the East of England Deanery. He became a Consultant Nephrologist in 2021 with a sub-speciality interest in transplantation and immune-mediated kidney disease. He spent a year as a clinical research fellow funded by the Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust / Isaac Newton Trust before commencing his PhD at the Molecular Immunity Unit, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology funded by a Kidney Research UK Clinical Training Fellowship with Professor Menna Clatworthy. His research has focused on bladder and kidney-resident innate immunity and its role in defence against infection and in tissue repair. He is currently a Tutor and Director of Studies in Medicine (pre-clinical) at St Edmunds College.

Peter O’Donnell is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, a member of the Relativity and Gravitation research group and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. His current research interests are:

Lanczos potential theory. The Weyl tensor can be generated differentially by a three index tensor: the Lanczos tensor, which was derived from a Lagrangian that was initially constructed to analyse the self-dual part of the Riemann tensor. An ongoing study is being carried out to investigate the mathematical and physical properties of the Lanczos tensor. In generating the Weyl tensor the Lanczos tensor acts as a potential – analogous to the electric tensor in electromagnetic theory.

Twistor theory applied to Lanczos potential theory. The purpose of this research is to utilise the techniques of twistor theory in order to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Lanczos potential, which appears to have some connection with local twistor transport.

Amongst his publications, Peter is the author of two books:

Introduction to 2-Spinors in General Relativity (World Scientific, 2003)

Essential Dynamics & Relativity (CRC Press, 2014).

He is a Tutor and Director of Studies at St. Edmund’s for Mathematics.

Eugene is an Individual Merit Scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, a Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle and an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia.

He has a B.Sc. in Marine Biology, a Doctorate in Fisheries Science and over 35 years research experience. He has led a series of large research programmes at the British Antarctic Survey and is currently Science Leader of the Ecosystems Team. As Science Leader, he leads a wide range of research projects studying organisms and ecosystems in the polar oceans. He has particular expertise in biological oceanography and ecological modelling, examining why animals occur where they do in the ocean, how big oceanic ecosystems work and the impacts of climate change and fisheries. Most of his research has been on Southern Ocean ecosystems, where he has also led major projects on research cruises. He has a special interest in Antarctic krill, a shrimp-like organism, which is the main food of the large numbers of predators (including penguins, seals and whales) that congregate in the Southern Ocean during the short summer period each year. His work has shown how interactions at different scales (between organisms and with their environments) are crucial in determining the overall structure and functioning of oceanic ecosystems.

Eugene has led international efforts to develop understanding of ecosystems throughout the Southern Ocean and to examine the combined impacts of climate change and fisheries. In the mid-2000s he led the development of the international ICED programme - Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics and currently chairs the scientific steering committee. He is also a vice-chair of the global Integrated Marine Biosphere Research Programme (IMBeR).  He has led international modelling studies of Southern Ocean species and food webs, including most recently the development of studies aimed at projecting the impacts of future climate-driven change. An important goal of his work, and that of the Team leads, is to inform the development of policy, providing scientific understanding to underpin decision making for conservation and management of human activities in the Southern Ocean.