ECF October 25/26

Alice Coffey

I have recently submitted my PhD in Global Sustainable Development as part of the TRANSFORM programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My research focussed on sustainable diets and child health, incorporating policy recommendations from these findings.

I graduated from my Master’s of Public Health at the University of Warwick in 2021 and I have a first-class degree in Nutrition and Health from Coventry University. I have experience as a research assistant for the Warwick Obesity Network based at the University of Warwick, and as a research assistant at the University of Birmingham. Within these roles I have co-written a literature review on the effects of intermittent fasting on weight loss, metabolic health and insulin resistance and I have also undertaken qualitative research and analysis. While studying I have also undertaken teaching within GSD, including running seminars, presenting lectures, supporting students with coursework and marking assessments.

I have co-authored several publications and have first author publications, and presented my findings at several conferences.

Away from research, I also have experience as a Project Coordinator for a community food project for the Active Wellbeing Society, a health-based charity in Birmingham.

Claudia Di Tosto

Claudia Di Tosto is a contemporary art historian, museum professional and PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Warwick. She is currently researching the recent history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale through the lenses of global and national art histories, exhibition history and postcolonial theory to explore the Pavilion as site of national self-definition and redefinition. Prior to starting the PhD, she worked for various institutions such as: IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), V&A (London, UK), Vatican Museums – Contemporary Art Department and MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts (Rome, Italy).

Nicola Hamer

Nicola Hamer has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis explored how communities across the USA, Jamaica and Barbados use poetry to process and protest ecological grief — grief caused by broken relationships within ecosystems. Nicola has given talks at conferences in five countries and shared her work in creative and academic publications. In 2025-26, she will be splitting her time between two interdisciplinary Warwick institutes, as an early career researcher at IAS and as an early career teaching fellow at the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL).

Cat Jones

Dr Cat Jones is an IAS Early Career Fellow and a Research Officer in Evidence Synthesis at the Education Endowment Foundation. Her research interests span parental engagement, teacher education and education policy. Achievements include an Open Research Award 2025 for commitment to research transparency and usability, ECR Presentation 1st Prize at the British Education Research Association Conference 2022, and multiple peer reviewed publications.

She is a former Parliamentary Research Fellow, DfE Policy Fellow, and Vice-President of Oxford University Student Union. Cat is also an experienced teacher and serves as Vice-Chair of Governors at a primary school in the North West. She holds a PhD Education, MA Social Science Research, MA Educational Leadership, PGCE, and BA Experimental Psychology.

Farjana Kabir

Farjana Kabir (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies and an IAS Early Career Fellow at Warwick University. Her thesis, Theatre of Transformation: An Autoethnography, challenges the charitable model of applied theatre for displaced women. Utilising a rigorous Practice as Research (PaR) methodology, Kabir argues that theatre becomes a relational and iterative rehearsal of democratic life, enabling women to construct a new social and political ontology. Recent practice includes theatre-performance-installation The Kitchen Window Diaries (2025) at Warwick FAB and Dandelion: A Weed is Still a Flower at the Bolton International Film Festival (2024).

Oluwatosin Orababa

Oluwatosin Orababa recently completed his PhD at the School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick. His doctoral research focused on developing a new treatment for chronic biofilm infections using a historical remedy. He was also recently honoured with the prestigious 2025 Infection Science Award by the Microbiology Society. Currently, as an IAS Early Career Research Fellow in the same department, his postdoctoral research aims to understand the interaction between antimicrobial resistance mechanisms in chronic biofilm infections. His long-term career goal is to continue to contribute positively to the body of knowledge in the AMR field. Outside of research, Tosin enjoys playing football.

Ummul Fayiza Puthiya Peedikayil

Ummul Fayiza is an IAS Early Career Fellow and Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant at Warwick Law School. She recently completed her PhD at Warwick Law School on ‘Destitute’ Muslim Women and Muslim Personal Law Reform in Postcolonial India: A Critical Analysis of Muslim Women’s Rights Discourse in the Light of the Shah Bano and Shayara Bano Cases. Her research critically examines legal reforms concerning Muslim women’s rights to maintenance and divorce within the legally plural context of postcolonial India.

Charlotte Spear

Charlotte Spear is an Early Career IAS Fellow and recent PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled “Locating the Human: World Literature and the Concept of Rights” and explores the role of literature in rethinking dominant human rights frameworks. She has published in Modern Language Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Journal of Human Rights Practice. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume, Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production with Routledge (2025). Charlotte is also a Research Associate at York University Centre for Applied Human Rights. Outside of academia, Charlotte has also worked for multiple international NGOs on issues including access to education and refugee rights.

Lizzie Smith

Lizzie Smith has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis, titled “Unsettling the Multispecies Encounter in Contemporary Ecopoetics,” explores the capacity for poetic encounters with uncharismatic others to suggest alternative modes of multispecies flourishing, with chapters on ocean invertebrates, insects, bacteria, and fungi. Her research interests include decolonial ecologies, ecofeminism, and weird creatures of all kinds, and she is always looking for interdisciplinary conversations.

Dan Wood

Dan is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Dan submitted his PhD thesis entitled “Relative Predictability: The International Political Economy of Passive Investment” to the Department of Politics and International Studies. Passive investment is a financial strategy which suggests optimum returns are made by tracking the returns of a market index like the FTSE 100 rather than by trading individual stocks. Dan’s research problematises the strategy, index providers like S&P and asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard. Dan is interested in the temporal element of passive investment and how the strategy works to make financial markets predictable.

Shaoyu Yang

Shaoyu is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. She recently submitted her PhD in Translation and Transcultural Studies at Warwick, funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Scholarship. Her research explores the intersection between translation and the traumatic memories of twentieth-century China, specifically investigating how diasporic works and their translations transmit and (re)construct the memory of the Nanjing Massacre across languages, borders, cultures, and time. Shaoyu’s work has been published in Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies. Her research interests include translation and memory, literary trauma theory, war literature, diasporic literature, and Chinese diaspora.

Xinyao Zhang

ZHANG Xinyao is an IAS Early Career Fellow and has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

Her research interests include gender and translation, fan and amateur translation and the intersection between audiovisual translation and transnational feminist translation studies. Her doctoral project examines the reception of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in China through translation and online circulation. Specifically, it explores how Chinese translations, together with feminist engagements on social media platforms, have reframed A Room of One’s Own and contributed to the articulation and ongoing negotiation of local feminist agendas.

Outside academia, she works as a freelance translator and subtitler, and has collaborated with ZOO Digital to make subtitling training more accessible to users in different regions.