Seven Asa Briggs Visiting Fellowship awards have been made to a 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.

Professor Michael Davies, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research said: “The awarding panel were delighted with the quality of the cohort of inaugural Briggs Fellows who want to come here and work with Sussex faculty across the spectrum of our research strengths, from the humanities to the physical sciences.”

Asa Briggs Visiting Fellows for 2017 are:

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 19th and 20th centuries.

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, 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.

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 Leung, TELUS Mobility Research Chair in Advanced Telecommunications Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of 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 e-health.

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.

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.

Each fellow will be giving a guest lecture during their visit. Details of the dates and how to book will soon be available on the Sussex Lectures website.

Further information: www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/research/sussexresearch/asabriggsvisitingfellowships/fellows