The Queen's College Record 2020

SENIOR TUTOR’S REPORT
The College elected twelve new Fellows this year.
Professor Jon Keating FRS joined us as the new
Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy. He
was formerly the Henry Overton Wills Professor
of Mathematics in Bristol, and Chair of the
Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research. His
research interests include random matrix theory and its
applications to quantum chaos, number theory, and the
Riemann zeta function.
Reports and College Activities
Nicholas Owen
Our new Fellow in Philosophy, replacing Professor
John Hyman, who moved to the Grote Professorship
of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College,
London, is Professor Catharine Abell. She comes from the University of Manchester,
where she has worked since 2006. Her most recent book is Fiction: A Philosophical
Analysis (Oxford, 2020), which develops a philosophical account of fiction as a social
practice, providing original explanations of the nature of fiction, the norms governing its
understanding and interpretation, and the nature of fictional entities. Her next research
project will address the nature and importance of artistic style.
Professor Steve Kelly, our Browne Research Fellow, has become our second Fellow
in Biological Sciences, in association with a Royal Society University Fellowship at
the Department of Plant Sciences. He works on photosynthesis, evolution, gene
expression and bioinformatics. His research group aims to identify the molecular
regulators and mechanisms that control the expression of photosynthesis genes in the
world’s most important food crops, the grasses.
We also elected a second Fellow in Materials Science. He is Professor Robert
Weatherup and comes to us from a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA, and a Diamond-Manchester
Fellowship at Diamond Light Source. His research concerns reactions occurring at
material interfaces in batteries and catalytic reactors. He is leading a new project,
funded by the Faraday Institution, to develop characterisation methods for probing
buried interfaces in lithium-ion batteries.
We were also joined this year by a new Fellow in Applied Mathematics: Professor José
Carrillo. Professor Carrillo was Professor of Applied and Numerical Analysis at Imperial
College London from 2012 to 2020. He has recently been awarded a European
Research Council grant which will fund his research on non-local partial differential
equations for complex particle dynamics. This research focuses on systems involving
a large number of individuals showing collective behaviour, and investigates how to
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 9