The Postgraduate Office
The Postgraduate Office can be found just along the corridor from the Porters’ Lodge.
The Office can help with administrative tasks throughout your time at Churchill – from writing letters to help you open a bank account, to monitoring visas, to generally providing help and advice.
The Postgraduate Office will also assign you a pastoral tutor.
What is a tutor?
During your time here at Churchill, you will have a tutor. Tutors are concerned with your welfare and progress throughout your time at the Churchill. You should feel free to speak to your tutor at any time, and they should be your first point of contact for any matter concerning yourself and the College, or for advice or help on any personal or financial matter.
Tutors can also act as intermediaries in official relations between Postgraduate students and the University. Academic problems are primarily the responsibility of your research supervisor or director of studies, but these matters are often also useful to discuss with your tutor.
You can meet the Postgraduate tutorial team below.
Rebecca Sawalmeh and Lily Hunter
Postgraduate Administrative Support Team
Rebecca and Lily are here to help our Postgraduates at Churchill College. Do please pop along if you have any questions about Cambridge life. The Postgraduate office is usually open 8:30am-4:30pm, Monday to Friday.
Email: postgrad@chu.cam.ac.uk
Telephone: 01223 336157
Dr Alastair Lockhart
Senior Postgraduate Tutor
Dr Alastair Lockhart is the Senior Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Alastair’s research focus is in 20th century religious history with a special interest in new and non-mainstream religion and the psychology of religion.
He studied Undergraduate Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge, before an MSc in Computer Sciences and an MA in the Psychology of Religion, both at the University of London. Following doctoral research in Cambridge on the relationship between religious, psychological and philosophical thinking in interwar Britain, he was a Research Associate and then an Affiliated Lecturer in the Divinity Faculty. He was a tutor at Hughes Hall, a Postgraduate and mature Undergraduate college of the University, for several years before joining Churchill in 2023.
Professor Alex Webb
Postgraduate Tutor
Professor Alex Webb is a Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Alex is a Professor in Cell Signalling in the Department of Plant Sciences. He obtained his BSc from Stirling University and his PhD from Lancaster University.
He is a leading expert on the mechanisms by which plants sense environmental signals and measure time. He runs a research lab investigating circadian signal transduction, with the goal of increasing food security through crop improvement.
Professor Webb teaches aspects of cell signalling in plants, animals and microbes, in all three years of the Natural Sciences Tripos. He supervises second year Cell and Developmental Biology and aspects of plant physiology in the third year.
Dr Liz DeMarrais
Postgraduate Tutor
Dr Liz DeMarrais is a Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Liz is an archaeologist with wide-ranging theoretical interests that include, most basically, material culture or ‘things’ and social relations in the human past.
Research areas include the American Southwest, New England, Hawaii, and the Andes; her current research activity involves an exploration of heterarchy in the Andes. Heterarchy is social organisation that involves networks and linkages that are horizontal, fluid, and often informal, rather than rigidly institutionalised in the hierarchical forms that we experience in modern Western society.
In related research, she has explored the ways that craft production in the past might be differently organised in heterarchical settings, and she considered how art and other symbolic material culture might tell us about the experience of everyday life in heterarchical (smaller-scale) societies in the past.
Professor Benedikt Löwe
Postgraduate Tutor
Professor Benedikt Löwe is a Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Benedikt is a Fellow at Churchill College, a Bye-Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, a Director of Studies for Mathematics at Churchill College, Lucy Cavendish College, & St Edmund’s College, and an Affiliated Lecturer of DPMMS. He is supervising for Part II (Automata & Formal Languages and Logic & Set Theory) and lecturing for Part III of the Mathematical Tripos.
He is also affiliated with the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Fachbereich Mathematik at the Universität Hamburg.
Dr Thanuja Galhena
Postgraduate Tutor
Dr Thanuja Galhena is a Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Thanuja works on materials chemistry and her current research focuses on 2-dimentional material-based dispersions, inks, coatings, composites and their structural and functional applications.
Dr Galhena was a Senior Scientist at Versarien plc. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cambridge Graphene Centre and a Teaching Fellow in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Graphene Technology at the University of Cambridge, before joining Versarien. She graduated with a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, followed by a M.Phil. in Nanotechnology and Material Science and studied for her PhD at University of Cambridge at the Department of Engineering.
Dr Clare Sander
Postgraduate Tutor
Dr Clare Sander is a Postgraduate Tutor at Churchill College.
Clare is an Affiliated Assistant Professor in Clinical Medicine, Respiratory teaching lead and College lecturer in Medicine. She is a Consultant Respiratory Physician at Addenbrookes Hospital, specialising in acute and chronic respiratory infections including TB, NTM and respiratory complications of both primary and secondary immunodeficiency. She is involved in clinical research and guideline writing in these areas. She is also the East of England Respiratory training programme director.
Dr Sander completed her Undergraduate training at Queens’ College Cambridge and Lincoln College Oxford, returning to Oxford years later to complete her PhD in TB vaccinology at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. She completed her Clinical Postgraduate training in Edinburgh and London and has been back in Cambridge since 2010.
