New Berkeley Fellows Announced at Trinity College

Posted on: 19 September 2001

The College’s Berkeley Fellowships were announced by the Provost of Trinity College, Dr. John Hegarty on Wednesday, 19 September. Seven outstanding academic staff have been elected Berkeley Fellows, allowing them financial support to concentrate on research for one year. Their research projects range in diversity from editing The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance to examining policy requirements in the food and agricultural sector.

“The Berkeley Fellowships are a clear indication of Trinity actively promoting and supporting research within the College. This is the second year of the Berkeley Fellowships and I am pleased to see the variety of subject areas represented. Remaining on campus to be part of the scholarly community, the Fellows will continue to supervise their graduate students,” said Dr. Hegarty.

The Berkeley Fellows of 2001 and their research areas are as follows:

Prof. Ruth Byrne of the Department of Psychology will write a book on ‘Rationality and the Imagination’. It will propose that the human imagination is organised by highly rational principles and is far more logical than previously believed.

Prof. William Coffey, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, will prepare the second edition of the best-selling book, The Langevin Equation, which is concerned with the theory of the Brownian motion.

Prof. Dennis Kennedy, School of Drama, will edit The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, a large scale academic reference work with some 1.2 million words. He will also write a book for the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series called Shakespeare and the Director.

Prof. Alan Matthews, Department of Economics, will examine the information requirements of policy-makers in the food and agricultural sector. His work will explore some of the complex questions facing the industry as consumers demand more stringent food quality and safety and production systems have to become more environmentally sustainable.

Dr Christine Morris, School of Classics, will produce a publication on the archaeological excavation of the Minoan peak sanctuary of Atsipadhes (a mountain shrine, c. 1,900-1,700BC) in Western Crete. This will be the first detailed study of a peak sanctuary excavated under modern conditions.

Prof. James Sexton, School of Mathematics will focus on developing algorithms and applications for the analysis of the new physics which is expected to be observed in experimental work planned at the world’s largest particle colliders at CERN in Geneva and at Fermilab in Illinois in the next few years.

Prof. George Sevastopulo, Department of Geology, will examine the sequence of events involved in the evolution of fossil crinoids. The results of his research will be published in international palaeontological journals.