St John’s Elects Eight New Career Development Research Fellows

In 2024, St John’s established a Career Development Research Fellowship (CDRF) programme, offering early-career academics an outstanding opportunity to build a research profile within a collegiate community. These fixed-term postdoctoral fellowships, tenable for four years, allow the postholder to focus on a programme of original research with opportunities to develop their career through teaching and other academic activities. Over time, the College aims to elect at least one CDRF in each subject taught at St John’s, enriching its research and teaching community across a range of disciplines.

The inaugural round of elections in 2024 saw the appointment of seven CDRFs in Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, Engineering, Music, and Politics. The 2024 CDRFs have contributed lay descriptions of their respective research projects, which can be read online here.

On 19 February 2025, St John's Governing Body elected eight new CDRFs for the 2025/26 academic year:

• Dr Jascha Achterberg (CDRF in Psychology) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. His research is aimed at understanding the mechanisms underlying computations in neural systems. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His personal website can be found here.
• Dr Conor Brennan (CDRF in Modern Languages) is currently a Lecturer in German at Jesus College and Oriel College. He read for a PhD in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin, analysing responses to the climate crisis in contemporary fiction, considering works from a wide range of cultural contexts, including Austria, Australia, Poland, Germany, Ireland, and South Korea.
• Ms Eleanor Eldridge (CDRF in Law) is currently a doctoral candidate in Law at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on rights jurisprudence, with a particular emphasis on the work of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld.
• Mr Noah Kravitz (CDRF in Mathematics) is currently a doctoral candidate in Mathematics at Princeton University. He is interested in arithmetic combinatorics, Diophantine approximation, and Ramsey theory, as well as topics relating to symbolic dynamics, and extremal and probabilistic combinatorics.
• Dr Giulia Morale (CDRF in History of Art) is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research explores modern art in the Mediterranean in the second half of the twentieth century. More information about her research at Bibliotheca Hertziana is available here.
• Mr Ashkan Sepahvand (CDRF in Fine Art) is currently a doctoral candidate in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and St John’s College, Oxford. His artistic research project focuses on the Nurafkan Archive at the Bodleian Library, a collection centred around the manuscript epic written and illustrated by Ali Midrekvandi, an Iranian peasant working with the British occupation forces in Tehran during the Second World War. His personal website can be found here. Some of his work can be found on Instagram.
• Dr Jakub Skrzeczkowski (CDRF in Mathematics) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (José A. Carrillo group). His research broadly focuses on the analysis of partial differential equations. He completed his PhD in Mathematics at the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2023.
• Mr Joshua Smailes (CDRF in Computer Science) is currently a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His research focuses on two key areas of cybersecurity in the context of space systems: detecting and mitigating attacks at the physical layer, and providing robust and efficient authentication through key management protocols in large interplanetary networks.

Congratulations to all eight newly elected CDRFs. We look forward to welcoming them to St John’s in Michaelmas 2025 and keenly anticipate their contributions to College life.