Homerton College is delighted to welcome its newest Fellows, who were formally sworn in at the Fellows’ Swearing-In ceremony on 16th March 2026.
Honorary Fellow
Dame Elizabeth Anionwu
Dame Elizabeth Anionwu is, quite simply, a trailblazer.
Born in Birmingham in 1947 to an Irish mother and a Nigerian father, she spent her early years in a Catholic children’s home, where a nursing nun who cared for her eczema with warmth and patience inspired her to become a nurse herself. She began her NHS career at sixteen, as a school nursing assistant in Wolverhampton – and never really stopped.
In 1979, she became the United Kingdom’s first sickle cell and thalassaemia nurse specialist, co-founding the country’s first nurse-led screening and counselling centre in Brent. She later became Dean of the School of Adult Nursing Studies at the University of West London, where she also founded the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice. In 2016, she co-led the campaign to erect the statue of Mary Seacole at St Thomas’ Hospital – the first named memorial to a Black woman in the United Kingdom.
Dame Elizabeth holds the Order of Merit, was appointed a Dame, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. Her memoir, Dreams from My Mother, was published in 2021. She was named one of the 70 most influential nurses in the history of the NHS, and received the Pride of Britain Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
Her life’s work has been about making healthcare fairer, more visible, and more human. Homerton is honoured to welcome her to the Fellowship.
Fellow
Dr Aude Belin-Rauscent
Dr Aude Belin-Rauscent is a neuroscientist and electrophysiologist whose research asks a deceptively simple question: why do some people develop addictions and others do not?
Her work at the Department of Psychology investigates the neurological and psychological mechanisms behind compulsive disorders – including drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder – drawing on more than fifteen years of behavioural neuroscience research.
Having trained at the University of Bordeaux and worked at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research before coming to Cambridge, Aude has been part of Homerton’s community for some time, teaching PBS students and serving as an undergraduate tutor.
Bye-Fellow
Dr Jane Monson
Dr Jane Monson is a poet, independent researcher, and Specialist Mentor for disabled students at the University of Cambridge. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and a PhD on the prose poetry of the French poet Francis Ponge.
Jane was a lead organiser for the recent event marking a key anniversary of the Bristol Bus Boycott.
She edited This Line is not for Turning, the landmark 2011 anthology of contemporary British prose poetry, described by fellow poets as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘necessary’. She followed that with British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Her own collections – Speaking Without Tongues, The Shared Surface, and The Chalk Butterfly – have established her as one of the leading voices in this still relatively underexplored form.
One distinguished Australian poet has called Jane ‘the fairy godmother of prose poetry’ – a title she wears lightly alongside her considerable body of critical and creative work.
Associate Fellows
Professor Neshan Wickramasekera
Professor Neshan Wickramasekera is Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Churchill College.
He works in the field of geometric analysis – a branch of mathematics concerned with the geometry of surfaces and spaces, and in particular with questions about their regularity and the nature of their singularities. One way into his research is to think about soap bubbles: when a wire frame is dipped into soapy water, the film that forms takes the shape that minimises surface area. Neshan’s work asks deep and technically formidable questions about when such surfaces are smooth, when they develop irregularities, and what those irregularities look like. His answers have resolved several longstanding open problems in the field.
Neshan completed his PhD at Stanford and held positions at MIT, UC San Diego, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before returning to Cambridge in 2008.
Dr Rachel Williams
Dr Rachel Williams is a Consultant Paediatric Endocrinologist. Her information is being updated.
