Graduate Scholarships & Financial Support

I am a third year DPhil student working at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM), also collaborating with the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology. My research investigates how oestrogen modulates fat distribution by altering signalling between adipocytes and macrophages.

Oestrogen drives the regression of abdominal fat, while promoting the expansion of gluteal adipose, contributing to differing fat distributions in men and women. This shift towards lower body fat storage by oestrogen positively impacts metabolic health, yet we have little mechanistic understanding as to how oestrogen exerts region-specific effects on adipose. Cellular models tend to consist solely of adipocytes, despite the existence of many other cell types in adipose tissue which communicate with adipocytes. Immune cells, particularly macrophages, are important for adipose tissue turnover and inflammatory status, and are polarised towards a beneficial anti-inflammatory phenotype by oestrogen. This may subsequently alter the niche for the expansion of adipocytes in a depot-specific manner.

My work uses cellular models, functional assays and bioinformatic analyses to pick apart these depot-specific and oestrogen-induced cell-cell interactions and their subsequent metabolic consequences. This research helps our understanding of intra-tissue signal exchange, and how these pathways could be utilised to target metabolic disease, which is an ever-growing problem in face of the obesity epidemic.

I am a fourth-year DPhil student in theoretical physics. I study the collective behaviour of epithelial cells under the banner of `active matter', a label for systems that consume energy and inject it into their surroundings. Active matter exists at a range of length scales, from subcellular proteins to flocks of birds. In the context of a cell, energy is supplied at microscopic level, resulting in propulsion, stresses, and interactions with neighbours. Understanding the collective behaviour of epithelia from the perspective of physics has implications for metastasis and morphogenesis. Such collective phenomena include flocking, phase separation and a number of liquid-crystalline and glassy states.

I work with a multi-phase-field model that permits cell-scale resolution of shapes, equilibrium forces and active interactions, which has advantages over other agent-based or continuum models. Using this model I have been able to characterise rotation in confinement and the flow of cells in a channel, and I have found a form of phase separation induced by the differences in interactions between two components of a mixture of cells. I hope also to model fluctuating adherens junctions to fluidise a monolayer and to develop tools for investigating the liquid-crystalline structure of epithelia.

I am a third year DPhil student in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. My doctoral research contributes to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics which seeks to understand how speakers exploit socially meaningful linguistic variation in performances of individual and group identity. More specifically, my thesis investigates the use of feminine gender-marked forms in English to index (i.e., point to) cisgender gay male identities.

To explore this phenomenon, my research examines contemporary gay men’s uses of various communicative resources (feminine pronouns, gendered pejoratives, emojis and reaction GIFs/images that depict women or are feminine-coded, etc.) in naturally occurring speech and/or in computer-mediated discourses. While there is a long and complex history of gay men using feminine-associated linguistic resources, my (primarily qualitative) research utilises a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to explore how the transformation of gay culture since the early noughties has impacted linguistic performances of “gayness” among contemporary gay men. In doing so, my thesis grapples with the following research questions: 1) What specific kind(s) of ‘femininity’ is/are indexed through these communicative resources? 2) Why are these indexicalisations of femininity sometimes viewed by members of the LGBTQIA+ community as offensive or problematic? 3) Have the linguistic tools that gay men call upon to index femininity evolved over time in terms of their forms or functions?

I am a second year MPhil student in English Studies (Medieval Period) whose main research interests focus on nonmaterialist ecocritical approaches to animal vocality in medieval texts. By extension, my work seeks to assess the medieval changes in perception of the natural representational capabilities of language, with a view to eventually conduct a long-durée assessment of this topic from an Anglo-Saxon to Later Medieval English context. My work has, so far, sought to assess this inter-period shift through definitions of voice and their relation to human and animal bodies, ideas of bodily and vocal articulation, didactic contexts of language acquisition, and the Classical philosophical and linguistic discourses which underpin Early Medieval understandings of vocal figuration within literary, but more importantly, non-literary texts.

Broadly, my area of research can be situated under the umbrella areas of ecocriticism, animal studies, or critical animal theory. However, my work’s intention is to represent a divergence with recent critical methodological and theoretical orthodoxies, such as the neoliteral emphasis on the material animal. It is my contention that abandoning anthropocentric approaches is restraining because medieval textual animals find themselves constructed and represented within uniquely human hermeneutic and semiotic systems- most prominently that of language.

Through such a hermeneutic approach engaged with language as a representational meaning-making system, I pursue not what animals mean in medieval texts, but rather how they mean. To do so, I have expanded past the traditional literary canon (an evidential base which I think is essentially skewed) and have found very fertile ground in Anglo-Latin and Old English transmissions of Late Antique grammatical treatises. It is my hope that this research might eventually meaningfully contribute literary insight around contemporary conceptions of language.