OPEN Visiting Fellowships
The OPEN Visiting Fellowship is a mutual learning and development opportunity for research and policy professionals. As Visiting Fellows, policy professionals have the opportunity to explore policy questions and challenges with research professionals in their Host Department and with others across the University; to co-convene workshops of interest to them, their colleagues and their Host Department, contributing to longer-term, institutional relationships; and to advise research professionals in their Host Department on approaches to policy engagement.
A pilot scheme, running from March to September 2025, is enabling seven departments and units to host Visiting Fellows. Each Visiting Fellow is supported by one or more Academic Leads and by the University-wide Policy Engagement Team.
More information about OPEN can be found in the OPEN Strategy 2025-30. For more information on the OPEN Visiting Fellowship please contact Noora Kanfash.
"The OPEN Visiting Fellowship is a brilliant way of helping academics to better understand and engage with the policy process, through interacting with a policy practitioner in a sustained way, one-to-one. By bringing policy professionals into the Oxford ecosystem, they can support students, early-career researchers and other colleagues to better appreciate the complexities and nuance of policy impact, and hopefully they will also find networking within Oxford both interesting and fruitful in terms of understanding the strengths and limitations of academia and for making new connections."
E.J. Milner-Gulland
Introducing the 2025 Visiting Fellows and their Academic Partners
Alex Pykett, Jennifer Altehenger, and Martin Conway
Alex Pykett is Deputy Head of China Department at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). He has previously been posted to New Delhi and Prague and has worked across a range of political and security issues, with a particular focus on Asia and Europe. Interested in new perspectives and research trends in history, he will be working principally with the History Faculty, as well as exploring interdisciplinary links that might inform contemporary foreign policy issues and policy-making in government. He is keen to look at how a closer understanding of government might assist established and aspiring academics, and how their work can benefit policy formation and organisational improvement in the Civil Service.
Jennifer Altehenger is Associate Professor of Chinese History, and the Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at Merton College. Having started as a historian of modern Chinese law, she is now completing a project on the global history of light industry and design (from policy to manufacturing) in the People’s Republic of China. This work has involved collaborations with museum curators, industrial design professionals, and schools, thus giving her opportunities to connect with non-academic audiences.
Together with Martin Conway, she will co-host Alex’s fellowship. This is a particularly important time for the faculty to host a policy professional with extensive knowledge of Asia and Europe. The faculty has expertise in a range of subjects – including global history, the history of international relations, security, law, the environment, science and medicine – and this fellowship will be a chance to explore how these fields might benefit from and contribute to policy development. During the fellowship, the hosts will run workshops to introduce students and postholders to Alex’s work and the world of policy-making, and organise events to bring policy professionals and historians into conversation about how to build bridges between different kinds of expertise.
Martin Conway is Professor of Contemporary European History, and a fellow of Balliol College. His published work has covered different aspects of the socio-political history of twentieth-century Europe, including books on Catholic Politics, Political Legitimacy, and Democracy in Western Europe after 1945. He is currently working on a study of male citizenship in twentieth-century Europe. As co-host of Alex, Martin will be concerned to use this opportunity to strengthen links between the History Faculty and the FCDO at a time of rapidly evolving diplomatic and political contexts.
Helena Dodd and Alice Norton
Helena Dodd heads up governance, performance and advises on biosecurity for the UK Integrated Security Fund. This uses a whole-of-government approach to find creative solutions to the most complex national security challenges outlined in the Integrated Review Refresh 2023.
Helena is interested in prioritisation of research and programming efforts to ensure maximum impact, value for money and increased UK resilience towards biological threats. Helena aims to use this OPEN Visiting Fellowship as an opportunity to strengthen collaboration with academics and explore new mechanisms to incorporate expert advice into policymaking.
Alice Norton is an Associate Professor leading the Pandemic Sciences Institute Policy and Practice Research Group. Her group undertakes applied research on the design and implementation of policy and practice for pandemic preparedness and response. Alice is also Scientific Director of the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness undertaking research and policy development to support global research funders in their preparedness and response to infectious diseases and is the Academic and Policy Lead for the Africa Pandemic Sciences Collaborative. Alice also acts as a Course Advisor on the MSc International Health and Tropical Medicine, leading the policy and evaluation modules and is on the OPEN Steering Group.
Alice is interested in approaches to research prioritisation and how academics can support policy decision making on biosecurity and hopes that the fellowship will result in greater connections in these areas.
Tommy Wise and Sara Shaw
Tommy Wise is the Policy Lead for Care Technology at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). Currently, his work is to lead the development of ‘new national standards and trusted guidance’ for care technology, a government commitment announced in January 2025. Tommy joined the civil service as an analyst, working on areas such as social care reform and UEC performance, before becoming a Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary at DHSC and now policy lead for Care Technology.
During the fellowship, Tommy will work with researchers at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and more widely, to strengthen the links between academia and policy-making. Areas of focus include: approaches to digitally enabled social care, how to generate effective evidence in care technology evaluations and adapting health economic approaches to social care. The fellowship will also include convening partners from across the care sector to discuss how technology and digital can be harnessed effectively.
Sara Shaw is Professor of Health Policy & Practice in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, where she leads a programme of work on the organisation and delivery of health and social care, including the role of technology in shaping care. She is Director of DECIDE, an NIHR-funded rapid evaluation centre focused on technology-enabled remote monitoring across health and social care, which generates policy-relevant evidence to support real-world adoption and scale.
The OPEN Visiting Fellowship provides an opportunity to build on work that Sara’s team, and the wider department, are conducting around digitally-enabled care; identify evaluation priorities relating to the adoption, spread and scale of digital technology in the specific context of social care; and build knowledge and skills amongst the team about engaging with the digitising social care landscape and those developing and implementing related policy.
Helen Tattam, James Robson and Xin Xu
Helen Tattam is a Strategy Lead within the Department for Education’s Skills Strategy Unit. She joined the DfE in March 2022, after working for over a decade at the University of Sheffield. Helen initially entered DfE as a senior policy adviser focused on further education oversight, and then moved into the Skills Strategy and Engagement Division to develop her interest in wider post-16 skills system strategy. Helen is also one of the DfE leads for the ‘Sheffield Policy Campus’, which aims to maximise the major Civil Service policymaking presence in the Sheffield and wider South Yorkshire region, including through the development of a knowledge exchange and policy collaboration framework, to enable government departments, experts and stakeholders in the region to work together on cross-cutting issues more routinely. Helen’s visiting policy fellowship with the Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) therefore has a dual focus, seeking to support the development of the government’s long-term post-16 education and skills strategy (announced in Labour’s manifesto) via engagement with SKOPE’s latest research, and to test ways of joint working between the Skills Strategy Unit and SKOPE in order to develop a plan for ensuring ongoing policy collaboration.
James Robson is Director of SKOPE, Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems and Director for Research at the Department of Education. He is also a co-investigator for the Centre for Global Higher Education. James’ research focuses on the political economy of Tertiary Education systems, bringing together key interests in the nexus of education and employment, the critical study of skills supply and demand, research eco-systems, access, social justice and sustainability. He has received major funding from the ESRC, the AHRC, the GCRF, the Edge Foundation, the Royal Society, the British Academy, the Office for Students and Research England.
Xin Xu (许心) is a Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Her research concentrates on higher/tertiary education and research including tertiary education and research policy, governance, and assessment; global dynamics and internationalisation of tertiary education and research, including cross-border academic and knowledge mobility; and other areas of research on research, including research culture, value and ethics. Projects she currently works on include the CGHE project ‘Research on Research: the research function and mission of higher education’, a project named ‘International academics in mainland China’, and on ‘Ethical research in international and comparative education during Covid-19’.
Jessica Lawrence and Jonathan Pugh
Jess Lawrence is a UK civil servant, working in the Cabinet Office. Her current role is in the COBR Unit where she prepares for and responds to short-notice national-level crises, such as widespread flooding and human disease outbreaks, that severely impact the lives of people in the UK and British citizens overseas.
Jess is interested in how ethics can be consciously brought into government decision-making in crisis situations. When making big policy changes in normal time, government carries out impact assessments to understand the likely outcomes of the policies it may implement. Crises, however, accelerate and distort policy-making for a range of practical, economic, psychological and social reasons, meaning it can be harder to use the normal processes for assessing new policy under the very tight time constraints and considerable pressure. Jess is excited to be working with academics at the Uehiro Institute and drawing on their expertise in practical ethics to develop a useable framework to guide decision-makers in their consideration of ethics in crisis.
Jonathan Pugh works in philosophical applied ethics and is interested in how we can use the tools of moral philosophy to address complex policy questions. He was previously a member of the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator, and has published work in philosophical and medical journals on a number of topics in public health ethics, the ethics of psychiatry, clinical ethics, research ethics and the ethics of neuroscience.
He and his Uehiro colleagues are excited to learn more from Jess about precisely how crucial policy-making decisions are made, and to think of new ways in which the Uehiro Institute’s work could usefully be brought to bear on the policy-making sphere. Jess’ policy experience on a number of pressing issues overlaps with the research interests of many Uehiro researchers.
“I have no doubt that Jess’s insights will help us all improve the ways in we can try and make our work impactful for policy. In return, I am confident that we can offer something useful in helping her to further explore the value of a philosophical approach to addressing the ethical questions that continue to arise in policy-making.”
Jonathan Pugh
Rex Amos and Sadie Creese
Rex Amos is based in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. He has worked for HM Diplomatic Service across the international arena including in multilateral, bilateral, crisis management, programme and policy roles. Rex served in Afghanistan, worked with NATO and has had responsibility for strategic threats including nuclear and cyber. This fellowship will explore how academia, industry and the national security community can collaborate to manage the strategic implications of AI security. The fellowship will consider how we can promote cross-sectoral collaboration, the learning of lessons from other domains and offer recommendations to ensure that our decision-making processes are well informed and keep pace with technological developments.
Sadie Creese is Professor of Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science. She teaches operational aspects of cybersecurity including threat detection, risk assessment and security architectures. Her current research portfolio includes: threat modelling and detection with particular focus on AI, visual analytics for cybersecurity, risk propagation logics and communication, resilience strategies for business, privacy requirements, vulnerability of distributed ledgers and block-chains, understanding cyber-harm and how it emerges for single organisations, nations and the potential for systemic cyber-risk, and the Cyber Security Capacity Maturity Model for Nations.
Sadie is the founding Director of the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) at the Oxford Martin School, where she continues to serve as a Director conducting research into what constitutes national cybersecurity capacity, working with countries and international organisations around the world. Prior to returning to academia, she worked as a cybersecurity expert in business and as a research scientist specializing in security for the UK’s Ministry of Defence.
“The GCSCC looks forward to hosting the inaugural OPEN Visiting Fellowship and leveraging this opportunity to develop more robust and sustainable mechanisms for engagement between the cybersecurity research community and policymakers, thereby enhancing our collective impact.”
Sadie Creese
Joseph Lowe and E.J. Milner-Gulland
Joseph Lowe worked for 18 years in HM Treasury. He advised across all of government, at all levels, from Department heads to policy advisers and analysts, including looking after the UK government’s methodology for appraising and including social value in policy implementation.
Now having left the civil service he is hosted by the University of Oxford Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, working with colleagues engaged in academic research across the University, Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP) at Exeter and the academic community more widely. His objective is to assist bringing the academic community together with government, business and industry to develop and implement practical ways of taking biodiversity and climate change into account in developing and implementing public policy.
E.J. Milner-Gulland is the Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity. Her research group, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, undertakes a wide range of research, outreach and engagement projects, on five continents and in both marine and terrestrial settings. These include developing and applying methods for understanding, predicting, and influencing human behaviour in the context of local resource use in developing countries, and working with businesses to improve their environmental and social sustainability. Her team also works on controlling the illegal trade in wildlife and on designing, monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions in order to improve their effectiveness.
E.J.’s team are keen to learn from Joseph on the workings of government, and to help them think through how best to ensure that the value of biodiversity is recognised and embedded within government. They hope that by working with Joseph they will be able to make a meaningful contribution to the policy discourse at this critical time when a number of relevant pieces of legislation are in process.