St Catharine’s is looking forward to admitting over 260 new students at the start of the new academic year, alongside the admission of four Honorary Fellows, three Official and Professorial Fellows, and one new Junior Research Fellow.
“I am delighted to extend a warm welcome and congratulations to our newest students and Fellows ahead of the start of term when we will have plenty of opportunities to meet. With the completion of the Central Spaces building project over the summer vacation, you will find that you are in the same boat as everyone else: we are all finding our bearings in these new spaces and, I hope, excited by what we will achieve together thanks to these state-of-the-art facilities.”
Student admissions
St Catharine’s is set to welcome at least 127 postgraduate students (against our annual target of 105). It is typical for postgraduate courses to start at different times of the year, although most are due to start this month.
A total of 133 first-year undergraduate students will also be joining St Catharine’s this term. Students from state schools make up 76.9% of UK undergraduates due to start at St Catharine’s in October 2022 (the University's current target is to reach 69.1% by 2024–25).
“St Catharine’s has a established a proud track record of widening participation, enabling us to attract the brightest young minds whatever their backgrounds. Any COVID-related increased disparities in educational opportunity between applicants were carefully considered in our decision-making processes, which has helped us to stay on track to achieve Cambridge’s admissions targets. Our widening participation activities will continue to be a priority for St Catharine’s in the year ahead.”
Matriculation, the ceremonial admission of students as Members of the College, is scheduled for 1 October for postgraduate students and 4 October for undergraduate students.
Admissions to the Fellowship
The Master and the Official and Professorial Fellows of St Catharine’s serve as trustees and are members of the College’s Governing Body. Governing Body may confer Honorary Fellowships on individuals who have achieved at a very high level in their field, and offers Junior Research Fellows to support individuals who have recently completed their PhD or who are close to completion (who need not have studied at St Catharine’s). The admission ceremony for our new Fellows will be held on 30 September 2022.
Clockwise from top left: Professor Johan Bolhuis, Dr Peter Candy, John Harvey CBE (1954, Geography), Dr Christa Lundberg, Sir Tim Waterstone (1958, English), Jonathan Scott (1975, Law), Mikhail Safronov and Dr Nisha Nixon (2009, Medical Sciences)
New Honorary Fellows
Professor Johan Bolhuis is Professor of Cognitive Neurobiology at Utrecht University where he studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms of memory and language. His association with Cambridge started in 1982, when, as an undergraduate, he spent 14 months as a guest student at the Department of Zoology. After obtaining his PhD in Zoology at the University of Groningen, he held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. He was a Visiting Scholar at St Catharine’s (2016–2021) and has been an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Psychology since 2019. He lectures in Part II Zoology and supervises Part 1B Psychology students.
John Harvey CBE (1954, Geography) joined Unilever after graduation, where he took on a variety of roles, most notably Head of Transport and member of the company's UK Policy Committee. In 1984 he led the management buy-out of Tibbett & Britten from Unilever and the Dutch Railways, becoming the logistics company's Chairman and Chief Executive, overseeing its floatation in 1986, and establishing operations in 34 countries. John has supported the development of a wide range of organisations across private, public and charitable sectors. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport, the Institute of Grocery Distribution, the Institute of Logistics and Transport (Emeritus) and the Royal Society of Arts.
Jonathan Scott (1975, Law) has a longstanding connection with the city of Cambridge since his undergraduate years. He is currently Chair of the University Tribunal, Non-Executive Director at Cambridge University Press and Assessment and Chair of the Board of Governors for The Perse School. He was one of the country’s leading competition lawyers, retiring in 2015 as Senior Partner and Executive Chair of international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. He has been a non-executive director of the Gambling Commission, and stepped down as chair of the Competition and Markets Authority in 2022.
Sir Tim Waterstone (1958, English) founded Waterstones Booksellers in 1982, setting up his first small, experimental store in Old Brompton Road, Kensington. In rapidly building a chain from this tiny base, he promoted a unique model of major and sustained exposure for literary authors. He employed highly read and informed staff, who were passionate about literature. Under this personalised stocking, marketing and staffing model, Waterstones grew within ten years to become the largest bookseller group in Europe. Sir Tim is also a novelist, with five books published to date. In 2018 he was awarded a knighthood for his services to bookselling and to charity.
New & Re-elected Official & Professorial Fellows
Dr Peter Candy returns to St Catharine’s following his appointment as Assistant Professor in Civil Law at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Law. He was previously Sir John Baker Lecturer and Fellow in Law at St Catharine's (2019–21) and Fellow in Roman Law and European Legal History at the University of Edinburgh's Faculty of Law (2021–22). His research interests include Roman legal and economic history, with a focus on the relationship between economic development and legal change during the last centuries of the Roman Republic.
Dr Nisha Nixon (2009, Medical Sciences) completed her preclinical and clinical training at St Catharine’s, graduating with first class honours. She trained as a surgical Academic Foundation doctor in the East of England, and was appointed an Academic Clinical Fellow in Ophthalmology in 2020. Her research interests are in adult oculomotility and strabismus, particularly the application of novel technology in the assessment of eye movements. She is chief investigator of a clinical study involving the development of a novel virtual reality test of eye movements. She has supervised second-year undergraduate medical students at St Catharine’s since 2012, and completed her Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education in 2016.
Mikhail Safronov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge where he has lectured since 2019. He studied Applied Mathematics and Physics as an undergraduate at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and earned his Master's degree in Economics at the New Economic School in Moscow, followed by a PhD in Economics at Northwestern University, USA, in 2015. He was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge 2015–18, and was then appointed a lecturer by the University of Nottingham in 2018. His primary research interests relate to microeconomics theory, including but not limited to topics of game theory, mechanism design, search and experimentation, bargaining and negotiation.
New Junior Research Fellowship
Dr Christa Lundberg gained a bachelor's degree in liberal arts at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied book history at ENSSIB in Lyon, cultural and intellectual history at the Warburg Institute and post-classical Latin at UCLA. Her PhD research at Cambridge was funded by AHRC and Trinity College, with additional support from the Society for the Study of French History and the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. She is writing a book about how scholarly publishing transformed the academic study of theology in early sixteenth-century Paris. Her next research project is about the intellectual history of plagiarism.
