Fellowships recognise College research talent

Some 33 academics have been announced as the latest Chancellor’s Fellows, a five-year tenure track that invests in researchers delivering cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and innovation.

Ten of the new Fellows are based in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

World-leading research

The College cohort’s range of research includes Scotland’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, wellbeing in the criminal court, and how innovations in AI and machine learning can reduce workers sedentary behaviour when working from home.

Other focuses for the new fellows include investigating processes to boost healthy aging, exploring the reasons why the NHS has failed in some areas, and how to respond to a water crisis in the twenty-first century.

The College welcomes the following Chancellor’s Fellows:

Caterina Moruzzi – Edinburgh College of Art

Caterina Moruzzi has a background in philosophy and music. The researcher will be joining the School of Design, working closely with the Design Informatics team as well as other areas in ECA and the wider university. One of the key aims in Caterina’s proposal is to produce a set of design recommendations for a beneficial trade-off between agency and automation in the use of image generation models.

Agnes Arnold-Forster – School of  History, Classics and Archaeology

Agnes Arnold-Forster is a historian of modern and contemporary medicine and healthcare, and as a Chancellor’s Fellow will be researching the recent history of health activism, scepticism, and medical mistrust in the United Kingdom. Agnes says she is interested in finding out where the NHS has gone wrong, how it has failed some of its constituent communities, and what alternatives have been proposed and developed. The research will trace where and why the health service has sown discord and distrust, rather than engendering the more widely reported faith and allegiance.  

Gabrielle Watson – School of Law 

Gabrielle Watson joins Edinburgh Law School from the University of Oxford. As a Chancellor’s Fellow, she will lead a five-year interdisciplinary research programme entitled Justice and Wellbeing in the Criminal Court. Located in three distinct domains – the entering of plea, the trial, and the sentencing hearing – the research will explore wellbeing as a new analytic category for criminal justice scholarship and as an institutional commitment that courts must be required by justice to support and maintain.

School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Hannah Boast

Hannah Boast writes about how literature and culture can help us understand and respond to a water crisis in the twenty-first century. Her first book, Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Prize in 2021. Hannah's work has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the British Academy and the Royal Irish Academy.

Désha Osborne

Désha Osborne completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge where her research was a study of the nineteenth-century Caribbean epic poem Hiroona: an Historical Romance in Poetic Form. Her current project explores Scotland’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and society in the Eastern Caribbean, particularly the lives of women and children enslaved by Scots on those islands during the eighteenth century.

Sarah Morton – Moray House School of Education and Sport

Sarah Morton’s main programme of research brings together interdisciplinary expertise in health behaviour change, and innovations in AI and machine learning to support workers to reduce occupational sedentary behaviour when working from home. Central to Morton’s research is co-production –  a process that involves shared decision making across a broad range of stakeholders to co-design solutions that are innovative and sustainable, but most importantly are effective in the real world. Morton recently published a theoretical framework of best-practice for co-production, and will further this through her Chancellor’s Fellowship with a specific focus on the application of co-production in physical activity for health research.

School of Political and Social Science

Theo Bourgeron

Theo Bourgeron is a sociologist whose work focuses on combining economic sociology and the sociology of health. In his recent book, Alt-Finance: How the City Bought Democracy (Benquet and Bourgeron 2022), he investigates the rise of new financial sectors over the last decades, and how they fuelled the emergence of the libertarian right in the UK. His new work seeks to investigate how the transformation of the pharmaceutical sector results in new health social movements.

Shruti Chaudhry

 Shruti Chaudhry is a sociologist of the family, who seeks to better understand forms of rationality by locating the personal within wider contexts of social change. Her book on Moving for Marriage: Inequalities, Intimacy and Women’s Lives was published in 2021. Her future work will focus on research on ageing among ethnic minorities in Britain, given the increasing ageing population, and the lack of knowledge about the needs and experiences of this important group.

Laura Sochas

Laura Sochas is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of social policy, public health, sociology, and demography. Her work broadly focuses on how power, institutions, and social policies shape health inequalities, at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Laura’s planned research will explore the effect of social and political institutions on health inequalities and the links between reproductive justice and health. She will join the social policy subject area.

Marlee Tichenor

Marlee Tichenor is an anthropologist whose work will focus on exploring data production in global health, by focusing on the analysis of the actions and interactions of the multiplicity of actors making public and private health data in the context of three countries in West Africa (Senegal, Ghana, and Burkina Faso). This builds on her previous experience, including examining the role of quantified data and metrics in global health governance, investigating the World Bank’s influence on global metrics production, and on Universal Health Coverage policy implementation in Senegal.

 We are delighted to welcome this latest cohort of Chancellor’s Fellows, who join over 450 Fellows we have recruited through this scheme over the past decade. Their transformative projects will help us deliver our ambitious goals for research and impact in the areas of future health and care, tackling the environmental crisis, and harnessing data, digital and AI for social and economic benefit.

Professor Christina Boswell

Next round

A new round of applications for the next 30 Chancellor’s Fellows will open on 26 June 2023.

The funding uplift from the Scottish Funding Council following the University’s strong REF2021 results will partly fund both sets of fellows.

The University was committed to ensuring the principles of equality, diversity and inclusion informed the appointment process.

Nearly 60 per cent of the new cohort are female and 19 per cent are from ethnic minority groups.

Future vision

The University has awarded Chancellor’s Fellowships since 2014. They are designed to help the most promising academics advance from the early stages of their career to more senior roles, and to empower their ground-breaking research.

They are for academics with a vision for future leadership in research and innovation, which may straddle leading a major area of research, forging new industry partnerships, or research-led teaching innovations.

The new fellows will be supported to achieve their research and leadership ambitions through a tailored programme that helps them realise their research, innovation and leadership ambitions.

More on Chancellor's Fellowships 

Edinburgh Research Office