ECF Fellows

Assem Aimaganova

Assem Aimaganova is a PhD researcher in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Warwick and an IAS Early Career Fellow. Her research uses real-world clinical biomarker data to study disease severity and physiological responses during acute illness. Her PhD combines statistical modelling, machine learning and network analysis to develop biomarker-based severity models and investigate how relationships between biomarkers change with disease severity. Her current work focuses particularly on thyroid–immune interactions and methods for identifying nonlinear biomarker relationships in sparse clinical datasets. Her broader research interests include clinical data science, interpretable modelling and interdisciplinary applications of engineering methods in healthcare.

Anaïs Walsdorf

Anaïs Walsdorf is a historian of nineteenth-century industry and empire. Her collaborative PhD (University of Warwick and the Science Museum), titledMetallic Empire: Science and Industrial Imperialism in the John Percy Collection, 1851–89, focused on the relationship between the British Empire and the development of metallurgy as a scientific discipline. She also holds a BA in Development Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation from the London School of Economics. In addition to her academic work, Anaïs has worked as a museum, library, and archive professional in research and public engagement.

Tingxuan Liu

Tingxuan Liu is an IAS Early Career Fellow in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick. Her research situates East and Southeast Asian Anglophone literature within postcolonial and world literary studies, examining how literary form maps entangled histories of colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, developmental statecraft and neoliberalisation, with particular attention to Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan and Korea. Bringing literary analysis into conversation with political economy and modern Asian history, her work rethinks the Euro-American coordinates and centre–periphery, coloniser–colonised binaries through which postcolonial and world literary studies have conventionally organised the region. She teaches Modern World Literatures and Modes of Reading, and welcomes interdisciplinary conversations across literature, politics, history and sociology.

Teruni Ahamat

Teruni Ahamat is an IAS Early Career Fellow in the Department of Psychology. Her PhD examines how caregivers’ speech and gesture shape infants’ attention and language development during shared picture-book reading. She combines observational and experimental methods from psychology, linguistics and cognitive science to inform language acquisition theory and educational interventions. In her research, she is committed to open science: creating globally accessible datasets, using Registered Reports to test hypotheses, and contributing to international ‘Big Team’ science replication projects. Her wider research interests include gesture, language, cognition and child development.

Smriti Dutt

Smriti Dutt is an IAS fellow and a Chancellor's International Scholarship-funded PhD researcher. Her research focuses on South Asian art history, particularly colonial and postcolonial art, feminist perspectives, craft, and folklore. She is an Associate Fellow of Advance HE, UK (AFHEA), and currently works as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, with prior teaching experience in the English Literature and History of Art departments. She is a recipient of the 2026 Arts Scholar Award, recognising her academic contribution to arts research, higher education, and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Tingxuan Liu

Tingxuan Liu is an IAS Early Career Fellow in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick. Her research situates East and Southeast Asian Anglophone literature within postcolonial and world literary studies, examining how literary form maps entangled histories of colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, developmental statecraft and neoliberalisation, with particular attention to Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan and Korea. Bringing literary analysis into conversation with political economy and modern Asian history, her work rethinks the Euro-American coordinates and centre–periphery, coloniser–colonised binaries through which postcolonial and world literary studies have conventionally organised the region. She teaches Modern World Literatures and Modes of Reading, and welcomes interdisciplinary conversations across literature, politics, history and sociology.

Vineet Seemala

Vineet is a PhD student at WMG, University of Warwick. His research focuses on developing computational models of hip replacement surgery to predict fracture risk and assess implant stability post-surgery. The aim of his work is to support better surgical planning and reduce complications for patients. He has published in several peer-reviewed journals and presented his research at international conferences. His interests include computational biomechanics, patient-specific modelling for orthopaedic surgery, image analysis and processing, data science, and interdisciplinary engineering approaches that support personalised healthcare.

Silvester Schlebrügge

Silvester is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. He was awarded his PhD in Politics and International Studies for his thesis Back in Line? The Racialised Aesthetics of the UK’s ‘Small Boats Crisis’, which critically examined the ‘common sense’ politics of the border at the edge of national territory.

Working across International Relations and Political Geography, his research investigates the relationship between politics and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the role of representation and perception in the reproduction and contestation of state borders. Silvester’s current work explores these questions through studies of maritime bordering practices, migration discourses and aesthetic challenges to contemporary border regimes.

Tamar Rutter

Tamar is an IAS Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her PhD was an ESRC-funded project in collaboration with the charity Down Syndrome UK, investigating the experiences of families of children with Down syndrome of prenatal screening and the diagnostic pathway. This research aimed to understand parental experiences of support for autonomy and wellbeing in perinatal healthcare, including the representation of Down syndrome and disability in the clinical context, and implications for ethical practice. Tamar has published in several peer-reviewed journals and presented research at international conferences as well as events for professionals and advocates. Her background is in community learning disability nursing; her professional work grounds her passion for promoting understanding and reducing health inequalities for people with learning disabilities.

Katie Webb

Katie completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research explored the expectations and experiences of international in-service teacher students on the MA TESOL programme at Warwick. Her research utilised frameworks from applied linguistics, education, and intercultural studies to examine how teachers navigate cross-cultural learning environments. The findings challenge deficit perspectives of international students, demonstrating instead that they develop sophisticated strategies for navigating intercultural environments and negotiating the application of knowledge gained in Global North contexts to their teaching environments in the Global South. She has co-published three book chapters and two peer-reviewed articles on themes relating to teacher education and development.

She has also co-organised an online conference bringing together ELT (English Language Teaching) professionals from around the world, which attracted over 100 attendees.

She is currently the lead organiser of the BAAL/Cambridge University Press Seminar 2026: Beyond the Default: Rethinking Pseudonymisation in Applied Linguistics Research, a grant-funded event she secured alongside fellow research fellows and PhD candidates.

Xinran Gao

Xinran Gao is a sociophonetician and PhD researcher at the University of Warwick. Her research sits at the intersection of sociolinguistics, speech science, and computational linguistics, with a focus on how voice quality carries social meaning in bilingual and changing speech communities.

 

Her PhD examines voice quality in Shanghai Wu Chinese, investigating how breathy and creaky phonation vary across linguistic structure, discourse, and generation in a tonal variety undergoing change under Mandarin influence. Using acoustic analysis, quantitative modelling, and machine-learning methods, she explores how socially meaningful speech variation can shed light on language change while also informing more inclusive, human-centred speech technologies. She is also involved in interdisciplinary collaborations on language, identity, and the lived experiences of early-career researchers.

Saadia Gardezi

Saadia is a journalist and political cartoonist from Pakistan. She was awarded the Chancellor's Scholarship at Warwick Politics and International Studies (PAIS) in 2020 and she completed her PhD in 2026. Her research focuses on visual culture's importance to international politics and how "non-western" political cartoons, specifically in Pakistan, imagine the nation and national security.

She is the Co-Founder of Project Dastaan, an organisation that records oral histories of survivors from the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. She reconnects these survivors to their ancestral homes across the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders using VR and other new technologies.

She has won numerous grants to set up VR and traditional media installations of her films, including the British Council, Arts Council UK, and Warwick University's Enhancing Research Culture Fund. Her work has been displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museum, British Film Institute, National History Museum, Pakistan, and Partition Museum, India. In 2023 she was awarded the Warwick Award for Public and Community Engagement.

She is also a facilitator for the Researcher Development Office at Warwick University teaching design, social media writing and non-academic writing to Post-Graduate Researchers.

Kit Brown

Kit is based in the Department of Psychology and is interested the development of epistemic trust practices among young people online.

His PhD explores the developmental trajectory of adolescents learning how to make trust judgements about online information, the way this interacts with the affordances of online platforms, and how this can be supported. Through this, Kit became interested in interrogating the limitations of his own initial behavioural science intervention-focused approaches to combatting 'information pollution' online; what leads to this narrowing of outlook, and what context can be lost.

Kit is also keen to continue exploring interdisciplinary pedagogy and is currently working cross-intuitionally with a network of teaching-focused academics to incubate new pedagogical research for tertiary psychology teaching.

Aside from this work, Kit is also very interested in music - in performance, pedagogy and from a developmental perspective- and this has taken him to work with The Music Lab in the University of Auckland/Waipapa Taumata Rau on the effect of singing for newborn and caregiver health outcomes (as well as enthusiastic participation in numerous choirs on campus and beyond).

Will Berrington

Will is an Early Career IAS Fellow and recent Wolfson Scholar and PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

His research explores how labour market shifts in the wake of the 2008 financial crash have been narrated and processed by young workers through cultural forms including podcasts, political magazines, novels, and short-form video.

His work brings together cultural studies and political economy, whilst also drawing on strands of economic geography and critical social theory. In particular, it seeks to renew the theoretical insights of the Conference of Socialist Economists and the social theorist Simon Clarke.

Carys Hill

Carys is a PhD researcher in the Department of Sociology and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Working across sociology, cultural studies, and feminist media studies, her research explores the intersections of feminism, entrepreneurialism, platformisation, and consumption, and the use of creative/analogue methods like zine-making to explore experiences of digital media.

Her PhD research considers how feminists active online are shaped by, and navigate, the convergence of feminism, entrepreneurialism, consumption, activism, and precarity in digital platforms. In particular, Carys explores the entanglement of community and commodity in digital feminist spaces through the example of subscription platforms like Patreon, where content creators seek to ‘make a living’ from financial support from their audiences as a means to challenge inequality and precarity.

Carys’ work has been published in Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Gender Studies; she also has forthcoming co-authored chapters on feminist zine-making in Working-Class Knowledge(s) in the Academy: Theory, Practice and Method (Routledge) and on feminist hope in Feminism, LGBTI+, and Hope in a Turbulent Era (Edward Elgar).

Jacopo Francesco Mascoli

Jacopo Francesco Mascoli is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. His research explores the intersection of cinema and labour, with a broad focus on the relationship between film aesthetics and socio-political change. He is also interested in histories of collaborative and participatory filmmaking from a world cinema perspective, film theory, and Italian media culture more generally.His doctoral research is carried out across the School of Modern Languages and Culture and the Department of Film & TV Studies. His doctoral dissertation, Visions of Labour in Contemporary Italian Cinema (2006–2016), funded by the Chancellor’s International Scholarship, examines how contemporary Italian cinema portrays, interrogates, and positions shifting paradigms of labour in the wake of the 2007–08 global financial crisis. His work has been supported by several awards, including conference, event, and research grants from the Society for Italian Studies, the British Association for Film and Television Studies, the Warwick Humanities Research Centre, the University of Notre Dame, and the Journal of European Studies. His research is forthcoming in journals such as Cinergie and The Italianist.

Gabriel du Plessis

Gabriel is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. They were awarded a PhD in Sociology for their thesis Queer Protection: (En)countering Protection Strategies in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. Funded by the ESRC, their research examined the freedom-seeking practices and strategies of queer and trans refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp, with particular attention to how protection networks are formed, solidarity is cultivated, and transnational advocacy is pursued.

As an IAS Early Career Research Fellow, their research focuses on the increasingly central role of digital technologies in shaping the lives of SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression) asylum claimants. In particular, it explores how digital infrastructures, from encrypted messaging platforms to social media and biometric governance systems, mediate access to asylum, shape migration trajectories and decision-making, reconfigure evidentiary practices, and reshape the temporalities and geographies of protection.

Ben Campion

Ben is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and an Early Careers Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. He has recently submitted his thesis that focuses on philosophical issues surrounding photography, especially the role creative agency plays in a medium typically understood as mechanical or automatic. Ben works as an editorial assistant for the British Journal of Aesthetics and co-edits the BJA's sister journal, Debates in Aesthetics. He is also a member of the managing committee for Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts.