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PhD students

Below is a list of PhD students in the Department, undertaking postgraduate study.

Current students

Name Phd title and details Supervisor(s)
Image of person Thomas Addoah (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Rachael Garrett
Image of person Konstantinos Alexopoulos Quantifying the hydrology of the Greek alpine zone. Prof Ian Willis
Matthew Allen End-to-End Unsupervised Machine Learning Approaches to Crown Dieback Monitoring. Funding: AI4ER CDT. Dr Emily Lines
Saba Aslam Everyday forms of governance and claims-making for water infrastructures in Karachi city’s off-grid sites. Prof Charlotte Lemanski
Junaid Babar Ecological Crisis, Neo-colonialism and Corporate ‘Sustainable Development’ Strategy in Pakistan: An Ethnographic Study of Kabirwala (Punjab) and Tharparkur (Sindh). Dr Ayesha Siddiqi
Image of person Martin Baur Leveraging remote sensing-based information on plant water status for ecosystem models. Funding: Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. Prof Andrew Friend
Tatiana Bebchuk Using subfossil yew wood from South-eastern England to reconstruct mid-Holocene environmental changes. Funding: Hill Foundation Scholarship. Prof Ulf Büntgen and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Corinne Benedek Using Sentinel-1 SAR data to map the fate of meltwater in the percolation zone. Funding: CISS award. Prof Ian Willis
Image of person Prerna Bindra The aftermath: the human implications of conservation related relocations; and the institutions that shape them. Funding: Benefactor's Scholarship Award, St. John's College. Prof Bhaskar Vira
Image of person Diane Borden ‘Apis-temologies’: More-than-human Temporalities of Pollination and Economics. Funding: Cambridge International Scholarship. Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Karla Boxall Investigating annual and seasonal velocity variations of George VI Ice Shelf and its contributing glaciers. Funding: C-CLEAR NERC DTP. Prof Ian Willis and Dr Frazer Christie and Prof Neil Arnold
Image of person Joyce Brandão (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Rachael Garrett
Image of person Kate Brockie The characteristics, opportunities and aspirations of young women not in employment, education or training (NEET) in Bangladesh. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Bhaskar Vira and Dr Anna Barford
Emily Bugden Rights-based conservation: an alternative pathway for institutional climate action. Prof Bhaskar Vira
Thomas Bunting Developing Tools and methods for Agricultural Biodiversity Finance. Prof Rachael Garrett
Image of person Emiliano Cabrera Rocha Genomic Utopia in the Jungle: Indigenous Knowledge, Instruments, and Infrastructure in the Remaking of the Amazon. Funding: Gates Cambridge. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Enrique Cadenas Justice 2.0: exploring the experience of justice in the digital age. A comparative analysis of the UK, Brazil and Argentina. Prof Alex Jeffrey
Image of person Jack Campbell Gas ash-particle separation and the role of particle aggregation in volcanic plumes. Prof Michael Herzog
Image of person Emilie Canova The Arctic and EUrope: two overlapping geopolitical regions . Funding: Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. Prof Richard Powell
Natalie Carter Narrating gendered green violence: a critical ethnography of women living adjacent to protected areas in northern Uganda. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Image of person Sizhe Chen Machine Learning for past climate reconstruction: Identifying AMOC variations using proxyclimate fingerprints . Dr Francesco Muschitiello
Image of person Amandine Debus Using high-resolution Earth observation and socio-economic data to improve land-use classification and deforestation prediction in sub-Saharan Africa. Funding: NERC DTP (C-CLEAR). Dr Emily Lines and Emilie Beauchamp
Image of person Yuqiao Deng Tephra connections between environmental change and human prehistory in Ethiopia. Prof Christine Lane and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Emma Diduch The Demography of Derbyshire: Event History Analysis of Women's Labor Force. Participation and Family Formation Patterns in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Prof Alice Reid
Image of person Valerio Donfrancesco The political ecology of coexistence between people and large carnivores. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Nathaniel Douglass Methods to Preserve Social Networks at Emergency Shelters.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Dr Mike Bithell
Image of person Simone Eringfeld Voices from the Silent Continent: A sonic genealogy of Antarctic futures amidst a climate (of) crisis. Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Bronte Evans Rayward Animal Atmospheres and Scientific Practice on Bird Island. Funding: AHRC OOC DTP. Prof Richard Powell
Troy Fielder Natural Burial in the Anthropocene: Emergent Forms of Nature and Conservation. Prof David Nally
Image of person Rebecca Foster Energy justice and the transition to low carbon energy in Malawi. Prof Charlotte Lemanski
Image of person Premdeep Gill Studying antarctic seals by remote sensing. Funding: ESS DTP NERC. Prof Gareth Rees and Peter Fretwell
Image of person Lucy Goodman Large scale water-management infrastructure in Central and South Asia - to what extent have policies been based on flawed or incomplete economic analysis driven environmental. Funding: ESRC DTP.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Bhaskar Vira
Image of person Ciara Greaves Climate and Societal Impacts of Icelandic Volcanism. Funding: NERC DTP (C-CLEAR). Prof Clive Oppenheimer and Prof Andrew Friend
Image of person Abbie Greig Regulating ‘The Good Patient’: Organ Transplantation and the Regulation of the (Dis)embodied Self. Funding: Emmanuel College. Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Madeleine Hahne Building Zion in the Anthropocene The Complex Ways Religion and Geography Inform Climate Belief. Funding: Gates Cambridge. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Friederike Hartz Making the future possible? The IPCC, its philosophy and responsibilities in climate science and policy. Funding: OOC AHRC DTP and Pembroke College. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Mark Hehlen Crack & bang: Shear margin evolution on Thwaites, Glacier, Antarctica. Prof Poul Christoffersen
Maria Hernandez De La Pena The dynamics of human/nonhuman relationships in rural-urban migrations from the Oaxacan Sierra of Mexico to Los Angeles, California. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Image of person Coco Huggins A New Poor Law Politics? Exploring a Dickensian Discourse of UK Austerity from 2010 to 2020. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Mia Gray
Image of person Elizabeth Isaac Subsistence crises and the spread of plague across Eurasia and The Mediterranean Littoral between 1850-1960. Funding: Self-funding. Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Pei Jiang Seeds of Struggle: A Political Ecology of Millet Growing in Aohan, China. Funding: Self-funding. Prof David Nally
Image of person James Johnston Conserving a Safe Operating Space for Terrestrial Ecosystem Functioning via Integration of Plant- and Animal-based Ecologies and Models. Funding: DAERA Postgraduate Studentship. Prof Andrew Friend
Image of person Chloe King Communities and Nature First: The Regenerative Tourism Future of the Galápagos. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Maria-Prisca Kouakou Keessy (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Rachael Garrett
Image of person Ellen Kujawa Identifying data gaps and understanding policy in transboundary natural hazard management. Funding: Cambridge International Scholarship. Prof Amy Donovan
David Lawless Uncovering paleoclimate change in the Great Lakes using old-growth cedars and cave speleothems from the Saugeen Bruce Peninsula, Canada. Prof Christine Lane
Alice Lawrence Power, place, and transformation. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Kofi Lee-Berman Bright Clouds Shade Half the Pond: Assessing the geopolitical significance of regional geoengineering over the Great Barrier Reef. Funding: Dr Herchel-Smith Scholarship, Williams College, USA. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Stephen Lezak The new ‘Last Frontier’: Extraction and Adaptation in Rural Alaska. Funding: Cambridge International Scholarship. Prof Richard Powell
Image of person Debolina Majumder Labour informality and the urban landscape in Delhi. Funding: Smuts International Scholarship (Cambridge Trust).
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Alex Jeffrey
Image of person - Marwa Moving Across Scales: Negotiating Urban Resilience in Jakarta's Climate Adaptation Governance. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Image of person Elspeth Mathau Creating food in fragile Landscapes: impacts of environmental and climate change on biodiversity conservation, local food systems, and biocultural adaption in subarctic Canada. Prof David Nally
Noor Mazhar (Thesis title will be available in due course.)
Image of person Alice Millington ‘Amended Animation’: Engaging with the ‘More than human’ Topographies of Tibetan-Himalayan belief systems as a platform to approach climate change in the Himalayas. Funding: ESRC DTP IS. Prof Bhaskar Vira
Image of person Priti Mohandas The Politics of Power: Understanding “transformation” through gender, energy and domestic space in Transitional Housing in Cape Town, South Africa. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Charlotte Lemanski
Image of person Grace Mueller Theorising Back the Market for Labour: A Co-Produced Socio-Spatial Analysis from Nepal. Funding: ESRC DTP and Cambridge International Scholarship. Prof Bhaskar Vira and Dr Anna Barford
Image of person Matipa Mukondiwa The Pursuit of Knowledge: coloniality and decoloniality in Zimbabwean Secondary Schools. Funding: Cambridge-Africa Trust. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Joshua Nicholas Preparing for natural hazard disasters during a climate crisis: the influence of culture on people’s interaction with multi-hazard risk on the Commonwealth of Dominica. Prof Amy Donovan and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Charles Norman Developing a multi-millennial tree-ring record for the Taurus Mountains to contextualise the interplay between climate, civilisation, and religion in the Near East. Prof Ulf Büntgen and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Alice Oates Instruments of scientific governance? Historical geographies of Halley Bay, 1956-present. Funding: AHRC CDA.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Richard Powell
Image of person Tami Okamoto Territory and indigenous geographies in the Peruvian Amazon. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Audrey Palosse Advancing beyond the treeline: new ways of understanding Alpine vegetation dynamics in the Anthropocene. Prof Ulf Büntgen
Image of person Jinheum Park Long-range impacts of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT) eruption, 74,000 years ago. Funding: NERC DTP (C-CLEAR) and Cambridge International Scholarship. Prof Christine Lane and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Rachael Parker Allen Identifying Ecocide: expanding the legal geographies of the Chevron case in Ecuador. Prof Alex Jeffrey
Image of person Catriona Parpworth Brexit as rupture or just more of the same?: women’s everyday lives within and beyond the ‘lost decade’. Funding: ESRC DTP.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Alex Jeffrey
Image of person Samira Patel The Rise of a Technoscientific Third Pole: Climate Science, Data, and Culture in the Himalayan Cryosphere. Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Katie Peters How has the legacy of the Nepalese 1996-2006 People's War and transition to a federalist state shaped contemporary disaster risk governance arrangements?. Dr Ayesha Siddiqi
Image of person Nicholas Pritchard (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Viviana Pupeza Cecil Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo and Urban Transformations, 1890 - 1961. Funding: German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Dr Graham Denyer Willis and Dr Sneha Krishnan
Image of person Nazifa Rafa Connecting the disconnect between the cultural framing of disaster resilience by refugee communities and the disaster risk reduction strategies implemented by the host state: A case study of the Rohingya refugee settlement in Bhasan Char, Bangladesh. Dr Ayesha Siddiqi
Image of person Sarah Rafferty Infant and early childhood mortality decline in London, 1870-1929: a spatial and temporal analysis of its patterns, inequalities and policy impacts. Funding: AHRC.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Alice Reid
Annisa Meutia Ratri Greying in the Coast: Understanding the Intersection of Gender Inequality and Ageing in Fishing Communities. Prof Alice Reid
Cecilia Reed No Man's Land: Volcanic Terrain, Vulnerability and Imaginative Embodiment. Prof Amy Donovan and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Rosie Rice Un infierno viviente: changing community risk perception, vulnerability, and preparedness in the wake of the 2021 Volcan de Tajogaite eruption, La Palma (Canary Islands). Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Chloe Rixon Memory, Cinema and Polish Deathscapes: Re-membering the Holocaust. Funding: OOC AHRC DTP.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Matthew Gandy
Image of person Lily Marie Rubino Universal Access? Exploring everyday experiences of urban water insecurity in Newburgh, NY. Funding: Gates Cambridge. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Image of person Graham Sadler Remote monitoring of Arctic pollution from oil spills. Funding: Self-funding. Prof Gareth Rees
Mushtari Saidikova Health effects of atmospheric aerosols from urban and volcanically-influenced environments. Funding: University of Central Asia Cambridge Scholarship. Dr Anja Schmidt and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Hafsah Siddiqui The Politics of Mobilisation in Urban Pakistan. Funding: Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Charlotte Lemanski
Image of person John Slattery Abrupt sea ice loss in the Arctic: Tipping points in warm and cold climates. Dr Francesco Muschitiello
Abigail Smith Bringing law to its senses: waste, olfactory politics and the search for justice in New York City's 'overburdened' communities. Prof Alex Jeffrey
Owain Smith A case study of Antillanca, Chile - Assessing risks posed by volcanoes with no historical eruptions. Prof Amy Donovan and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Carolyn Smith Volcanic Imaginaries: Between Indigeneity and Risk Across the Chile-Argentina Border. Funding: ERC IMAGINE. Prof Amy Donovan and Dr Alexander Cullen
Image of person Catherine Tan Hacking the limits of the earth: A critical cartography of techno-utopias at sea, in space, and on the virtual world. Prof Alex Jeffrey and Prof Matthew Gandy
Ambika Tandon Migration and feminisation in southern digital economies. Prof Mia Gray
Ilanah Taves Variations in Responses to Newly Situated Wildlife Among Disparate Cultural Groups in Urban Spaces. Funding: Self-funded.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Lucy Thompson Stepping in Time and Space with Circum-Atlantic Performance: A Cultural and Historical Geography of Tap Dance. Funding: Internal Graduate Studentship, Trinity College. Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Benjamin Thurlow From ‘zero-tolerance’ to ‘living with the virus’: Geographies of containment in the elite political discourse of COVID-19 in New Zealand. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Alex Jeffrey and Prof Amy Donovan
Image of person Ainsley Trahan Eurasian Infrastructures of Seismic Importance: Transboundary Earthquake Risk Management in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Prof Amy Donovan
Image of person Albert Van Wijngaarden (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Richard Waters Anticipating the incalculable: the politics of urban climate migration models. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Joanna Watterson Infrastructural entrepreneurship in the off-grid city: energy access and provision in Cape Town and Johannesburg’s post-apartheid townships. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Charlotte Lemanski and Prof Jaideep Prabhu
Image of person Jon White Just in Time: Exploring experiences of 'time acceleration' in male UK gig economy workers. Prof Mia Gray
Image of person Fleur Winn Understanding participation in and through conservation research and practice. Funding: ESRC DTP KeS. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Image of person Deborah Wood "To Those Who Knew Him Best Because They Loved Him Most" : The Role of Grief and Family Networks in Preserving Exploration Histories. Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Mia Wroe Dangerous waters: investigating the distribution and social impacts of volcanic metal and volatile pollution in the East African Rift. Prof Amy Donovan
Image of person Hannah Wynton Explosive volcanism in the Kenyan Rift: a tephrostratigraphic perspective. Funding: NERC DTP.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Christine Lane and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Mingchun Xu China’s participation and evolution in South-South Cooperation — A study on China’s emerging development finance. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Image of person Naï Zakharia Gender and histories of Arctic field science, 1900-1950. Funding: OOC AHRC DTP and Cambridge European & Newnham College Scholarship. Prof Richard Powell
Image of person Tamara Zambiasi Brazil in the global contra-flow: the privatisation of basic sanitation as an instrument for universalizing access to water. Prof Emma Mawdsley and Pedro Loureiro
Marie Zedler (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Jure Zgubic CE317: Improving parametrizations for convection in climate models. Prof Michael Herzog
Peisong Zheng (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Dr Matt Osman

Recently approved for the PhD

Name Phd title and details Supervisor(s)
Image of person Katarzyna Baran International Development Cooperation from below: recipients' perceptions of development cooperation in Haiti. Funding: Self. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Simon Billett UK soft power in India. Funding: FCO?. Prof Emma Mawdsley and Prof Tim Wilkinson
Image of person Clare Elizabeth Bissell The Political Ecology of Trees and Birds in Ghana: People, power and perspectives driving landscape change in Kwahu East. Funding: ESRC - RSPB. Prof Bill Adams and Juliet Vickery
Image of person David Durand-Delacre The making of the 'climate migrant': an analysis of a circulating label in France and the Sahel. Funding: Cambridge European Scholarship. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Melissa Fielding The Space in Between: Everyday Life and Activism in Women’s Experiences of Social Housing in Contemporary Britain. Funding: VC Award and King's College. Prof Mia Gray
Image of person Xingran Gao Examining the Influence of Aerosols from Air Pollution on Current and Projected Temperature Trends in the Urban Area of Chongqing, China. Funding: Self Funding. Prof Michael Herzog
Image of person Ellen Gordon Street-level bureaucracy and inclusive governance in Ecuador. Funding: ESRC Knowledge Exchange Studentship. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Image of person Anna Guasco Narrating Cetacean Conservation: Gray Whale Migration, Histories, and Justice on the North American Pacific Coast. Funding: Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Maria Hagan Policing presence: the struggle for informal spaces of life for exiles in France in the shadow of an institutional alternative. Funding: VC Award and Wolfson College Scholarship and Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship. Prof Ash Amin
Image of person Maximilian Hepach The climatic: A phenomenological approach to climate and its changes. Funding: AHRC and Cambridge European Scholarship - Cambridge Trust CCEIT. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Sarah Hughes Development finance: private finance and innovative financing models in a ‘beyond aid’ era. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Image of person Dino Kadich Young people at Europe’s margins: An intimate geopolitics of the future. Funding: GATES America. Prof Alex Jeffrey
Image of person Edward Kiely Mental Health in the ‘Holding Pattern’: The management of madness in austerity Britain. Funding: ESRC. Prof David Nally
Image of person James Kirkham Reconstructing water flow beneath past ice sheets. Funding: ESS DTP NERC. Prof Julian Dowdeswell
Image of person Robert Law Fast-flowing ice in Greenland: fibre opticbmeasurements and process based modelling. Funding: ESS DTP NERC. Prof Poul Christoffersen
Image of person Anna Lawrence Botanical Biopolitics: The Socio-Political Lives of Flowers in Victorian Britain. Funding: AHRC Isaac Newton Trust Studentship (Cambridge AHRC DTP and AHRC). Prof Philip Howell
Image of person Rogelio Luque Lora The New Conservation Debate: Exploring Conservationists' Values and Viewpoints. Funding: Cambridge European Scholarship (CCEIT). Prof Chris Sandbrook
Image of person Joseph Alejandro Martinez Salinas Risk, Uncertainty and Rural Development in Colombia: Labour and Capital in Times of Food Security. Funding: COLCIENCIAS. Prof David Nally
Image of person Charlotte Milbank Wild Foods, Hunger and Nutrition – harnessing knowledge for sustainable food security. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Bhaskar Vira
Image of person Papa Momodou Jack The Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) Scheme: The role of ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status in explaining differential health outcomes in Ethiopia. Funding: GATES. Prof Alice Reid
Alasdair Neilson Embedding Green Capitalism: The Impacts of Biofuel Industries on Social Difference in Kenya's Great Rift Valley. Funding: ESRC matched with Pembroke. Dr Ivan Scales
Image of person Noam Obermeister Misaligned or mismanaged? Exploring the role of expectations and tacit negotiations in expert advice - the case of environmental science-policy in the UK. Funding: ESRC. Prof Mike Hulme
Image of person Michael Overton Governing Wildness: The more-than-human politics of rewilding landscapes. Funding: Self-funding. Dr Maan Barua
Image of person Peili Pey Urban green assemblage: a machinic approach to green cities. Funding: Self Funding. Prof Ash Amin
Image of person Ben Platt London in the 'Anthropocene': morphogenetic landscapes and environmental power. Funding: AHRC (OOC) DTP Scholarship and Cambridge Trust. Prof Matthew Gandy
Image of person Timothy Reilly Governance of the Arctic and the oil and gas industry. Funding: Self-funded. Prof Gareth Rees
Image of person Martin Rogers Mind the gap: exploiting satellite technology for coastal climate change adaptation in the data-poor 'gap' of intertidal zones. Funding: NERC Dream CDT. Prof Tom Spencer and Dr Mike Bithell
Image of person Udisha Saklani Dams, Development and Diplomacy: Deconstructing Indian dam-building in the Himalayas. Funding: MAC Scholarship at Newnham College. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Image of person Morgan Seag Equal Opportunities on Ice: Gendered institutional change in 20th century Antarctic science. Funding: GATES. Prof Michael Bravo
Olivia Shears Building with Nature: the role of bio-physical linkages within coastal wetland restoration. Funding: ESS DTP NERC. Prof Tom Spencer
Image of person Trishant Simlai The political ecology of conservation militarisation in India: Social and political implications of using surveillance technologies for conservation. Funding: Various. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Image of person Jonathon Turnbull A Radioactive Refuge: Caring for Contaminated Canids in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Funding: ESRC. Prof Bill Adams and Prof Matthew Gandy
Maximilien Zahnd Athabascan Conceptions of Space and Place through a Socio-legal Lens. Funding: Self. Prof Michael Bravo

Note: only those students who have given their consent to be listed online are listed above.