Research and knowledge exchange

Asa Briggs Fellows 2017

Seven Asa Briggs Visiting Fellowship awards have been made to prestigious group of International academics and Sussex faculty.

Named after a 'founding father' of the University and its second Vice-Chancellor, this new scheme enables inward visits for internationally outstanding academic collaborations to work on specific projects with Sussex faculty. The scheme is designed to enable our researchers to engage in collaborative work with the best people in their field regardless of their institutional base.

Asa Briggs FellowWilliam D Carrigan

William D Carrigan, Professor of History at Rowan University will be collaborating with Professor Clive Webb, HAHP on the project Facing Down the Mob: Preventing Lynching in the United States, 1865-1965. The project will focus on resistance to mob violence in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

An interview with Bill can be found here.

Christopher MillerAsa Briggs Fellow

Christopher Miller, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan will be collaborating with Professor Kathy Romer, MPS on the project Using Clusters of Galaxies to study the Dark Universe. The project will focus on the characterization of Dark Matter and Dark Energy using clusters of galaxies. 

Mehita Iqani Asa Briggs Fellow

Mehita Iqani, Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand will be collaborating with Dr Simidele Dosekun, MFM on the project African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics. The project moves beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be ‘saved’, as well as more recent formulations of it as ‘rising,’ to focus on the visual and material cultures of luxury consumption – champagne, designer wear, glitzy shopping malls and so on – on the continent. 

Asa Briggs FellowSteven Finkelstein

Steven Finkelstein, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas will be collaborating with Dr Stephen Wilkins, MPS on the project Exploring the Early Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope. The aim of this fellowship is to facilitate the collaborative definition and writing of a large proposal to secure open time on the upcoming successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, due for launch in late 2018. The proposed observations will allow Finkelstein and Wilkins to identify and study some of the first objects to form in the Universe. 

Victor LeungAsa Briggs Fellow

Victor Leung, TELUS Mobility Research Chair in Advanced Telecommunications Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University British Columbia will be collaborating with Dr Zhengguo Sheng, Engineering and Informatics on Wireless body area networking and computing for eHealth. The project focuses on the novel design and development of communications and computing technologies for eHealth. 

Asa Briggs FellowAlfred Sze-Lok Cheng

Alfred Sze-Lok Cheng, Associate Professor and the Deputy Theme Chief of Cancer Biology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong will be collaborating with Professor Simon Ward, Sussex Drug Discovery Centre on the project Structure-function of cell cycle-related kinase – from molecular mechanism to targeted drug development for liver cancer. The project will consolidate the long-term multi-disciplinary collaboration between a medicinal chemist and a molecular biologist with established and highly specific expertise necessary for the development of novel liver cancer therapeutics through structure-based drug design and mechanistic studies of an oncogenic kinase. 

An interview with Alfred can be found here.

Asa Briggs FellowSangeeta Dasgupta

Sangeeta Dasgupta, Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University will be collaborating with Professor Vinita Damodaran, HAHP on the project Adivasis Histories for the Anthropocene; Locality, Community and Environmental change in South Asia, 1900-2015