University secures eight Leverhulme early career fellowships
30 Sep 2025
Prestigious award for colleagues to undertake significant pieces of publishable work in science, humanities and social sciences.
Our University has secured eight prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships for research in science, humanities and social science.
The Fellowship is awarded to early career researchers, with a research record but who have not yet held a full-time permanent academic post, to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.
Associate Vice-President for Research, Professor Melissa Westwood said: “This is wonderful news for our colleagues and the University – great recognition of the exceptional research being led by our early career researchers. I look forward to seeing the work they produce and the impact they will have in the months and years ahead.”
Our Fellows are:
- Dr Mauro Torres, who specialises in the bioprocessing of mammalian cells. His Fellowship is for his work on engineering biology for scalable and cost-effective gene therapy manufacturing.
- Dr Astrid Weston, who specialises in nano-materials and has shown that twisting bilayers of 2D materials allows for the engineering of new properties, which could be used for optoelectronic devices with built-in memory. Her Fellowship is for her work on Moiré superlattices for new generation of electrocatalysts and chemical sensing.
- Dr Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio, who specialises in Latin American visual culture, literature and art, using queer theory and decolonial feminisms in her work. Her Fellowship is for her work on reframing the bicentenary and contending national imaginaries in Andean comics.
- Dr Joshua Rushton, a social and cultural historian of early modern religious life who focuses on Catholicism, connecting his study to broader cultural and spiritual shifts such as changes in Christian worldviews and environmental change. His Fellowship is for his work on Catholic renewal and environmental change in the early modern world.
- Dr Diana Berzina, an interdisciplinary researcher who focuses on online marketplaces for digital collectibles and cryptocurrencies and the blurred boundaries between legal and illegal activity, the market drivers, and the role AI plays. Her Fellowship is for her work on digital objects of desire and crime: human-object interactions in the Metaverse.
- Dr Angel Martin Caballero whose research interests span Employment and Industrial Relations, the Sociology and Political Economy of Work, and Human Resource Management. His Fellowship is for his work on the digital workplace: compliance, enforcement, and institutional change.
- Dr Naoise Murphy, a Research Fellow whose research interests are in queer and trans studies, gender and sexuality, modern and contemporary literature and postcolonial studies. Naoise’s Fellowship is for her work Quiet visibility: mapping the lesbian middlebrow.
- Dr Elena Racheva, a Research Fellow in Sociology, worked as a special correspondent for independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was a Fellow of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2015-2016) in Washington, DC. Elena’s main research interests are the legitimisation and justification of violence, its perpetrators, and its place in the popular consciousness. Elena’s Fellowship is for her work War without peace: Russian civil militarisation propaganda in post-Soviet states.
Further information
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