14/10/2026
🎉 We’re thrilled to welcome five new Gates Scholars to our brilliant postgraduate community at Churchill:
👉Mateu Font i Muganini is pursuing a PhD in French, working at the intersection of political philosophy and literary criticism. His doctoral project explores how contemporary French writers construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the political identities that make up French society, and how these literary configurations shape the ways in which their works and characters understand political phenomena and envision horizons of collective possibility.
👉 Rafi Freund is pursuing a PhD in Criminology. His research focuses on criminal sentencing, especially how tools like sentencing grids and guidelines, risk assessment algorithms, and mandatory minimum sentences are changing the scope of judicial discretion.
👉 Lillian Jackson is pursuing an MPhil in Archaeological Research. Her research examines health and human-environment interactions in past societies. At Cambridge, she is exploring livestock nutrition and disease burden in the Pastoral Iron Age of Kenya to better understand deep-time herding practices and the links between animal health, ecological processes, and human wellbeing.
👉 Marco Souza De Joode is pursuing a PhD in Astronomy with Prof. Cathie Clarke at the Institute of Astronomy. He uses radio telescopes to study discs of gas and dust around very young stars, to understand how planets are formed. Specifically, he looks at how the broader surroundings of these protoplanetary discs can play a role for the formation of planets.
And Ofir Hendel (not pictured) completed an MPhil in Economic Research at Churchill and is now continuing to a PhD in Economics. Her research investigates the human side of economic upheaval, with interests in AI, climate change and inequality.
Welcome to Churchill!
Gates Cambridge Institute of Astronomy Cambridge Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, Cambridge Cambridge Archaeology Cambridge University Institute of Criminology
