FOUR NEW Fellows and an Associate Fellow were sworn in at a ceremony presided over by the Principal, Lord Simon Woolley, on Monday 2 December 2024.
They are: Sandy Mill, Dr Manar Alsaif, Dr Stav Zalel and Dr Siddhartha Kar (all Fellows), and Reverend Ceri Payne (Associate Fellow).
Sandy Mill
Sandy Mill has amassed a wealth of experience in admissions and outreach across 8 years working across the University of Cambridge as an Admissions Tutor at Sidney Sussex College and Schools Liaison Officer at Churchill and Magdalene Colleges.
This follows a successful career in secondary education, where he taught various arts and humanities subjects at schools in Sussex and Cambridgeshire.
Sandy’s ongoing research through the Faculty of Education focuses on widening access to competitive-for-entry universities through the use of teacher professional development.
Dr Manar Alsaif
Manar is a geologist working in the University’s strategic partnership unit. She manages the University's institutional industry partnerships related to energy transition and decarbonising industries and the University’s Decarbonisation Network.
She specialises in Earth Science and holds a PhD in geodynamics and previously worked in the energy industry with a career spanning science and technology.
She is Saudi Arabia’s first female geologist and nature communicator, and has a keen interest in reframing the narrative for sustainability amongst local communities, and in the Middle East.
Dr Stav Zalel
Stav is a theoretical physicist who uses mathematics to explore the theory of Quantum Gravity, and questions about the Early Universe, like ‘what happened immediately after the Big Bang?’
Her expertise is in Causal Set Theory and her research pioneers the use of combinatorics (the mathematics of enumeration) to connect physical phenomena on the largest cosmological scales to the nature of gravity on the smallest scales.
Dr Siddhartha Kar
Siddhartha studied medicine in India, and earned a Masters in Public Health from the University of Texas, before receiving his PdD in cancer genetic epidemiology at Cambridge.
He returned to Cambridge in 2023 as Group Leader at the Early Cancer Institute in the Department of Oncology.
He was previously a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton. In 2020 he was awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship by UKRI, and has co-authored dozens of peer-reviewed research articles on the epidemiology of cancer.
Reverend Ceri Payne
Ceri is the Associate Vicar, based at St John the Evangelist, and is also the Choir Chaplain.
She was previously a practicing barrister for over 30 years, specialising in company law, including company reorganisations.
She began her theology training in 2019, studying at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
