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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)
Thomas Addoah (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Rachael Garrett
Matthew Allen End-to-End Unsupervised Machine Learning Approaches to Crown Dieback Monitoring. Funding: AI4ER CDT. Dr Emily Lines
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
Simon Billett UK soft power in India. Funding: FCO?. Prof Emma Mawdsley and Prof Tim Wilkinson
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
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
Image of person Emilie Canova The Arctic and EUrope: two overlapping geopolitical regions . Funding: Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. Prof Richard Powell
Sizhe Chen Machine Learning for past climate reconstruction: Identifying AMOC variations using proxyclimate fingerprints . Dr Francesco Muschitiello
Image of person Tiffany Dang Dispossession By Design. Funding: Newnham College. Prof Matthew Gandy
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
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
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
Image of person Frédérique Fardin Vulnerability and adaptive capacity in mangrove forests and their fisheries. Funding: Nippon NERUS. Prof Tom Spencer and Dr Mike Bithell
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.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Mia Gray
Image of person Xingran Gao (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Michael Herzog
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. Prof Bhaskar Vira
Image of person Ellen Gordon Street-level bureaucracy and inclusive governance in Ecuador. Funding: ESRC Knowledge Exchange Studentship. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
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 Anna Guasco Narrating cetacean conservation: histories, justice, and narratives of gray whale migration along the North American Pacific coast. Funding: Gates Cambridge Scholarship. 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
Mathilda Hancock (Thesis title will be available in due course.) Prof Andrew Friend
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 Sarah Hughes Development finance: private finance and innovative financing models in a ‘beyond aid’ era. Funding: ESRC DTP.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Emma Mawdsley
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 Dino Kadich Young people at Europe’s margins: An intimate geopolitics of the future. Funding: GATES America. Prof Alex Jeffrey
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. Dr Amy Donovan
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 Rogelio Luque Lora The New Conservation Debate: Exploring Conservationists' Values and Viewpoints. Funding: Cambridge European Scholarship (CCEIT).
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Chris Sandbrook
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 Joseph Alejandro Martinez Salinas Risk, Uncertainty and Rural Development in Colombia: Labour and Capital in Times of Food Security. Funding: COLCIENCIAS. Prof David Nally
- 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
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 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 Elisabeth Mjaaland Early-life effects on later-life health outcomes: Influenza, seasonality and feeding methods in 20th century Derbyshire. Funding: ESRC DTP (IS). Prof Alice Reid
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
Image of person Fleur Nash Understanding participation in and through conservation research and practice. Funding: ESRC DTP KeS. Prof Chris Sandbrook
Adam Noach The forgotten forests: remote sensing and predictive modelling to understand the structure, function and future of wet woodlands. Dr Emily Lines
Image of person Alice Oates Instruments of scientific governance? Historical geographies of Halley Bay, 1956-present. Funding: AHRC CDA. Prof Richard Powell
Image of person Tami Okamoto Territory and indigenous geographies in the Peruvian Amazon. Prof Sarah Radcliffe
Image of person Michael Overton Governing Wildness: The more-than-human politics of rewilding landscapes. Funding: Self-funding.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Dr Maan Barua
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
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. 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
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 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 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
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
Cecilia Reed No Man's Land: Volcanic Terrain, Vulnerability and Imaginative Embodiment . Dr Amy Donovan
Image of person Chloe Rixon Memory, Cinema and Polish Deathscapes: Re-membering the Holocaust. Funding: OOC AHRC DTP. 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 Udisha Saklani Dams, Development and Diplomacy: Deconstructing Indian dam-building in the Himalayas. Funding: MAC Scholarship at Newnham College.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Emma Mawdsley
Olivia Shears Building with Nature: the role of bio-physical linkages within coastal wetland restoration. Funding: ESS DTP NERC.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Tom Spencer
Image of person Hafsah Siddiqui The Politics of Mobilisation in Urban Pakistan. Funding: Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Prof Charlotte Lemanski
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. Dr Amy Donovan and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Image of person Carolyn Smith Indigenous Cosmologies and Active Volcanism Across the Chile-Argentina Border. Funding: ERC IMAGINE. Dr Amy Donovan
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
Ilanah Taves Variations in Responses to Newly Situated Wildlife Among Disparate Cultural Groups in Urban Spaces. Funding: Self-funded. 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 Dr Amy Donovan
Ainsley Trahan Gender Transformative Early Warning Systems: An Analysis of Heat Early Warning Systems in Ahmedabad, India. Dr Amy Donovan
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
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
Jonathan White Just in Time: Exploring experiences of 'time acceleration' in male UK gig economy workers. Prof Mia Gray
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
Mia Wroe Dangerous waters: investigating the distribution and social impacts of volcanic metal and volatile pollution in the East African Rift . Dr Amy Donovan
Image of person Hannah Wynton Explosive volcanism in the Kenyan Rift: a tephrostratigraphic perspective. Funding: NERC DTP. Prof Christine Lane and Prof Clive Oppenheimer
Maximilien Zahnd Athabascan Conceptions of Space and Place through a Socio-legal Lens. Funding: Self.
PhD thesis submitted for examination.
Prof Michael Bravo
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
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
Jure Zgubic CE317: Improving parametrizations for convection in climate models. Prof Michael Herzog

Recently approved for the PhD

Name Phd title and details Supervisor(s)
Image of person Isabel Airas The affective politics of political movements: structures of feeling, political resonance machines and hotspots. Funding: ESRC DTP. Prof Ash Amin
Image of person Henry Anderson-Elliott To re-frame the conservation of polar bears in Svalbard, looking at the socio-cultural norms and values that structure the human relationships with the species. Funding: ESRC -College matched. Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Katarzyna Baran International Development Cooperation from below: recipients' perceptions of development cooperation in Haiti. Funding: Self. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Image of person Jean-Philippe Baudouin Winter rain, summer rain: adaptation, climate change, resilience and the Indus Civilisation (TwoRains). Funding: ERC (Archaeology). Prof Michael Herzog
Image of person Tanvi Bhatkal Making cities work for women: gender and urban planning in India. Funding: Self. Prof Charlotte Lemanski
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 Helen Brooks Can nature protect us from the coastal impacts of climate change. Funding: NERC. Dr Iris Möller and Prof Tom Spencer and Dr Katherine Royse
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 Annemarie Eckes-Shephard Improving our understanding of the role of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics in the global carbon cycle. Funding: Self. Prof Andrew Friend
Image of person Annette Green A political ecology of conservation and development corridors in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania. Funding: ESRC. Prof Chris Sandbrook
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 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
Marta Lang Influencing industrial facility compliance: provincial environment agency practices in Vietnam. Funding: CIS. Prof Keith Richards
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 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 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 Morgan Seag Equal Opportunities on Ice: Gendered institutional change in 20th century Antarctic science. Funding: GATES. Prof Michael Bravo
Image of person Adam Searle Celia's ghost: Liminality and authenticity in de/extinction. Funding: VC Award and King's College. Prof Bill Adams
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 Laura Trajber Waisbich Negotiating Accountability in South-South Cooperation for Development. Funding: CISS. Prof Emma Mawdsley
Yifu Wang Identifying conservation solution in data-poor environments - the Yangtze finless porpoise as a conservation case study (an advertised project). Funding: Self funding. Prof Nigel Leader-Williams

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