73 Scholarship

30 October 2018

We are delighted to announce the establishment of the 73 Scholarship Fund for Geography.

 

 

The fund was set up through the generosity and initiative of Peter Newman and Mark Teversham (both Geography, 1973) to support the subject in college, and to encourage their contemporaries to support geographical excellence at Hertford. This year we have been able to award two scholarships which, thanks for match funding from the Economics and Social Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council have provided full funding for both students and their studies.

Galina Alova read Economics at Glasgow University. She graduated top of her class, winning a host of prizes, and then moved to Cambridge to read for an MPhil in Land Economy, where she earned a Distinction. She has worked as a Summer Analyst for Morgan Stanley and as an Economist for the UK and Scottish Governments, as well as for the Trade Ministry in Namibia. Having spent three years working as a Policy Analyst and Economist at the OECD in Paris, she applied to Oxford for the DPhil programme, where her research examines the relationship between a company’s climate-change stance and its management, with a focus on the energy sector. She aims to explore both companies’ transparency in relation to their climate-change positions as well as the impact of climate-related risks on corporate decisions. As such, the project is at the intersection of climate change policy and environmental economics and business management. She hopes to provide a model for assessing corporate management of energy companies in the context of climate-related risks and to shed light on how climate change can affect a company’s risk-return profile.

Matthew Clements comes to Hertford from the University of Birmingham, where he has just completed an MSc in Applied Meterology and Climatology. Prior to his MSc, Matthew read Geography at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where held a college exhibition and was awarded the Met Office Academic Partnership Prize for the best climate science dissertation. He is now based at Hertford, where his DPhil research looks at climate systems, with a focus on dust cycles and their impact on climate predictions. He hopes to quantify dust activity from the Etosha pan in Namibia, which is the largest source of dust in the Southern Hemisphere. This will be achieved by collecting data using automatic weather stations, infrared satellite imagery and laser scanning, as well as reanalysing information collected by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. In so doing, he aims to shed light on the relationship between anticyclones and the erosion of dry sediments from the pan.