New Fellows join Sidney Sussex College

Professor Elizabeth George

Professor Elizabeth George (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is the KPMG Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on differences between people at work, and how these differences affect their interactions with each other, and ultimately their outcomes at work. 

Specifically, she has studied how relations at work are shaped by the different types of work contracts held by individuals (short-term versus open-ended contracts), and how these affect workgroup relationships, trust in the management, performance, and the nature of work. A second stream of work examines how differences in demographic characteristics (for example gender/ethnicity) affect individuals in work groups. Her work has found that the effects of differences are asymmetrical depending on the status hierarchies within which individuals work. This work underscores the importance of knowing how difference is viewed by both those in the minority and those in the majority. 

Her work has been published in major international academic journals and has also been used by the International Labor Organization and the US Society for Human Resource Management to help inform public policy and management practice. She has served on the Board of Governors and the executive committee of the Managerial and Organizational Cognition and the Organizational Behavior Divisions of the Academy of Management. She is co-editor-in-chief the Academy of Management Annals and has previously been co-editor in chief of Organizational Psychology Review and associate editor on the Academy of Management Annals, Australian Journal of Management, and Organization Studies. She serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Academy of Management Discoveries. She has held academic positions at universities in Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Dr Maura Malpetti

Dr Maura Malpetti is an Assistant Research Professor and a Race Against Dementia Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. In 2024 she was also appointed as an Emerging Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute. She originally trained in Italy and after obtaining her PhD in Clinical Neurosciences in Cambridge, she further trained as a visiting researcher at the University of California San Francisco, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 

Her research group focusses on the application of brain scans and blood tests to measure early brain changes, like inflammation and the accumulation of junk proteins, that can forecast clinical outcomes in people with several types of dementia. Her work aims to identify clinically relevant biomarkers and targets for early detection, more accurate prognosis and effective treatments in people living with these conditions. To facilitate real-world and clinical translation of research, she has established and leads the Open Network for Frontotemporal dementia Inflammation Research (ON-FIRE), which involves >20 UK-based centres and aims to accelerate research and clinical trial delivery for patients living with frontotemporal dementia.

She has been part of the Sidney Sussex College community since her PhD studies, during which she held a Vice-Chancellor’s & Sidney Sussex College Scholarship, and subsequently continued on as a college Research Associate and Bye-Fellow, before being elected to the Fellowship this year.

Professor Yusuf Sayed

Professor Yusuf Sayed is the Professorial Chair of Global Education Policy and Equity in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Sussex and an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. 

His research focuses on the relationship between the development and implementation of policy within education systems and its implications for equity, and social justice.  His current work examines global education policy, equitable partnerships, education decolonisation, teacher professionalism and development, and climate justice in and though education.

Dr Deirdre Serjeantson

Dr Deirdre Serjeantson read English at Magdalene College, Oxford, and went on to take a PhD at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of the poet and academic Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. She was the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at the University Library in Cambridge, working on censorship in sixteenth-century editions of Petrarch, and subsequently took up a lectureship at the University of Essex, where she taught for several years. She joined Sidney as a bye-fellow in 2019. 

Her work is largely focused around the early-modern sonnet, from its earliest appearances at the court of Henry VIII, through to the writings of Donne and Milton in the seventeenth century. She has published on sonnets as vehicles for political and religious expression, and on their place in the early-modern culture of translation.  She also works on the intersection of texts in English and Irish in the sixteenth century, and with her sister, Professor Geraldine Parsons (University of Glasgow) wrote The Hill of Allen: A Memory Map, about the literature of place in the medieval Agallamh na Seanórach [Colloquy of the Ancients] and its successors. 

Her current project is a joint biography of the early Protestant reformer Anne Lock who in 1560 published the first sonnet sequence in English as an appendix to her own translation of a series of sermons by Calvin, and Anne’s sister the recusant Catholic Jane Wiseman, who was condemned to be pressed to death in 1598 for her part in the Jesuit mission to England.

Dr Benjamin Arold

Dr Benjamin W. Arold is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich and earned his Ph.D. in Economics from LMU Munich. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University and Princeton University.

He is an applied microeconomist with research interests in labor economics, the economics of education, the economics of religion, and AI & economics. One strand of his research investigates how school curricula influence student achievement, attitudes, beliefs, choices, and long-term labor market outcomes. Another line of his work employs tools from artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and computational linguistics to examine the effects of economic policies and educational interventions on employees and students.

His Ph.D. thesis was awarded the Prize for Best Dissertation in 2021/2022 by the German Economic Association's Section on Economics of Education, and he received the Fürther Ludwig Erhard Prize in 2023.

Dr Benjamin Zdencanovic 

Dr Ben Zdencanovic is a historian of the United States in the world, political economy, and social policy. He received his PhD with distinction from Yale University in 2019, where his dissertation was the winner of the Edwin W. Small Prize. Prior to coming to Cambridge, he taught at the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and the Yale Jackson School for Global Affairs. 

His first book, Island of Enterprise: The United States in a World of Welfare, 1940–1955, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and he is working on a new book project entitled The Cold War on Poverty: Race, Labor, and Manpower in the U.S. Warfare/Welfare State. His research has appeared in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, the Radical History Review, Diplomatic History, and elsewhere. He also writes for broader audiences in outlets such as the Boston Review, TIME, and the Washington Post.