New Fellows' first term at Downing

Three new Fellows joined Downing at the start of the academic year:  Professor Emma Lees, Dr Dino Kadich and Dr Yang Li.

The trio of new Fellows were formally admitted to the College by the Master, Professor Graham Virgo, in a ceremony on Friday 4 October 2024, along with returning Fellow Professor Dee Scadden.

Professor Emma Lees has joined as a Fellow in Land and Property Law. Her main areas of research are environmental and land law. Since arriving at Downing, she has been working with second-year Law students on their Land Law course.

Outside of college work, Professor Lees recently presented at the Parliament of Denmark at the invitation of the Danish Biodiversity Council, where she discussed the implications of the EU Nature Restoration Law for biodiversity protection in Europe.

Dr Dino Kadich is the new Whitworth Research Fellow in Geography. He is a political and cultural geographer interested in the geopolitics of the future. His research explores how young people imagine and enact futures as they negotiate neoliberal political economy, exclusionary political projects, and challenges to traditional senses of life-course.

Since joining Downing, Dr Kadich has been supervising on geopolitics and has been Director of Studies for IA and IB Geography students. An article he co-wrote has recently been accepted for publication in the journal Social and Cultural Geography. The article - ‘Diasporic Littering: Civility, Citizenship, and the Politics of Leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina’ - discusses public controversies over littering in Bosnia and uses these controversies to show how people are contesting the growing economic and social power of members of the country's diaspora who return to the country frequently on holidays.

Dr Yang Li is a new Fellow in Mathematics, having previously been an undergraduate at Downing. His research centres around several intimately related branches of differential geometry: Calabi-Yau metrics, special Lagrangians, and special holonomy manifolds.

In his first term, Dr Li has held supervisions with students on algebraic topology, as part of the Part II Mathematics course. He’s completed two collaborative papers and has given three seminar presentations at Cambridge, UCL and Imperial College London. He has also attended training events at the Royal Society and was a speaker at a conference in Berkeley, USA.

Professor Graham Virgo, Master of Downing, said: "I am delighted to welcome these new and returning fellows to the College. They are already making significant contributions to the teaching of our students and I look forward to seeing the continued impact they will make to our students and the wider College community."

Published 9 December 2024