St Catharine’s welcomes 259 new members for the new academic year

St Catharine’s College is due to admit 259 new members for the new academic year. Admissions for 2020–21 include a new Fellow and two new Junior Research Fellows:

• Dr Andrzej Harris has been admitted as a Fellow of St Catharine’s. He is a Research Associate in the University's Department of Biochemistry, where his research is focused on cryo-EM reconstruction and computational modelling of antibiotic transport by bacterial tripartite efflux pumps and related membrane proteins. He was previously a Teaching Associate at St Catharine's, supervising the College's medical and veterinary undergraduates.
• Fergus McGhee joins St Catharine’s as a Junior Research Fellow. He works on nineteenth-century poetry and its interactions with philosophy, theology, and psychology. His doctoral research at Magdalen College, Oxford looked at the diverse ways in which Victorian poets imagined the experience of knowing: as consolation or trap, encounter or possession, stimulus or hindrance to inquiry.
• Nafay Choudhury will also be admitted as a Junior Research Fellow. His work is situated at the intersection of socio-legal studies, legal pluralism, economic development and the rule of law. As part of his PhD at King’s College London, he is completing an ethnographic study of Afghanistan’s money exchangers to understand the interaction of state and non-state legal systems in the production of legal order.

All three Fellows would ordinarily have been invited as a group to an admission ceremony in October but Nafay’s admission has been postponed to enable him to relocate from the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, where he has been based since 2019.

Professor Sir Mark Welland, Master of St Catharine’s, commented, “The start of the new academic year is traditionally associated with new faces being admitted to St Catharine’s. I am delighted to extend a very warm welcome to all 254 new members, even if the experience of joining the College undoubtedly looks and feels very different this year. I am confident that their new perspectives and areas of expertise will strengthen our vibrant academic community as we continue to learn from and adapt to the current challenging circumstances.”

St Catharine’s is also looking forward to welcoming 112 postgraduate students (a number usually in the region of 105). A further 13 postgraduates will be enrolling onto non-residential courses, and 15 of our medical and veterinary students are progressing into their postgraduate clinical training. It is typical for postgraduate members of the College to enter their course at different times of year, although most start in September.

In addition, a total of 143 first-year undergraduate students (plus one exchange student) will be matriculating this month, slightly over the College’s usual capacity of 136 students. Places were confirmed for all applicants who met the terms of their conditional offer either by their algorithm-adjusted grades, or on the basis of their original centre-assessed grades. Given widespread interest in the assessment of A Level grades this summer, the College’s Admissions Tutors published regular updates about the undergraduate admissions process on the College website during August and September.

Of our incoming UK undergraduate students, 70.5% are coming to us from state schools. The University’s target as agreed with the Office for Students is for the percentage of UK state school entrants to increase to 69.1% across the University by 2024/25.