Trinity Hall welcomes new Fellows at Chapel ceremony

The occasion brought together the new Fellows, the Scholars, who are students recognised for outstanding academic performance, and the Master, Mary Hockaday.

The newly admitted Fellows include specialists in a wide range of fields, including economics, computational biology, medieval Italian literature and culture, physics, Latin American studies, and African politics.

The College also conferred Honorary Fellowships on two distinguished alumni: Dr Emma Pooley, engineer and former elite athlete, and Sir Tom Scholar GCB, former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury.

Speaking after the event the Master, Mary Hockaday, said: “It’s a delight to welcome six outstanding new Fellows this year who join us from all corners of the world in a wonderfully wide range of disciplines. They will strengthen our teaching and our academic community in myriad ways and Trinity Hall is proud they are joining us alongside our two exceptional Honorary Fellows.”

Research Fellows

Abelardo De Anda Casas joins Trinity Hall as Research Fellow in Economics. His research interests include political economy and development economics, focusing on populism and authoritarianism. Recent projects have studied the use of propaganda by Hugo Chávez to consolidate political power, and the economic and political legacies of colonialism in Venezuela.

Earlier this year, Abelardo was awarded the prestigious 2025 Wicksell Prize for his groundbreaking research paper, Poverty and Low Human Capital: The legacy of African slavery in Venezuela and the deep historical roots of Chavismo.

Staff Fellows

Professor Anna Pegoretti is Staff Fellow in Medieval Italian Literature & Culture. Her current research focuses primarily on Dante’s theological and philosophical culture, and on his intellectual formation in relation to the educational practices and institutions of his time, with special attention to the schools of the Franciscan friars. She has been a co-investigator of a major research project titled Books and Readers in Florence from the 13th to the 15th Century: The Library of Santa Croce, co-led by a network of Italian universities, and has published extensively.

Professor Teuta Pilizota joins Trinity Hall as Staff Fellow in Physics. Her research aims to understand the intertwined regulation of ion flows in bacterial cells, including the links with ATP generation, osmotic pressure maintenance, and homeostasis of certain intracellular ion concentrations. By doing so, she hopes to uncover the fundamental principles behind free energy preservation and offer an operational definition of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ grounded in the physics of free energy flows.

While focused mostly on fundamental science, Teuta has a significant track record of effectively translating research findings for industry application, including co-funding a start-up company OGI Bio Ltd.

Dr Ola Osman is Staff Fellow in African Politics at Trinity Hall. Her research investigates the legacies of transatlantic slavery and how these have shaped ethnic identities and hierarchies in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on conflict in Liberia. She was the recipient of a prestigious Gates Scholarship.

Bye-Fellows

Professor Valeriya Malysheva joins Trinity Hall as Bye-Fellow in Computational Biology. Her research is interested in fundamental questions in chromatin organisation, epigenetics and brain biology. She has a particular expertise in machine learning approaches to understanding neurodegenerative disease from the cellular level. Valeriya has an established relationship with Trinity Hall through its PDRA programme.