Congratulations to the following members of Univ who were recognised in the 2025 New Year’s Honours List:

Professor Nandini Das – photo Fran Monks

Professor Nandini Das OBE (1997, English), Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture in the Faculty of English and Tutorial Fellow in English at Exeter College, has been appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and to Public Engagement.

Professor Das’ works on early modern literature, prose-fiction (chivalric romance, in particular), travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from their appearance in the writings of major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors such as Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India.

Professor Ros Rickaby

Professor Ros Rickaby FRS OBE, Professorial Fellow at Univ, Professor of Biogeochemistry at the Department of Earth Sciences, Oxford and Chair of Geology at Oxford Earth Sciences, was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to Biogeochemistry.

Professor Rickaby joined the University of Oxford in 2002 and has been a Professor of Biogeochemistry since 2010. For the past 30 years, her research has utilised the past co-evolution of life, environmental chemistry, and Earth’s climate to inform predictions of future change. Her passion for the natural world has been an enduring theme of her work; she has spent time on various conservation projects across Europe, and during her time at Harvard she volunteered a penguin carer in the Boston Aquarium. She has been recognised with prestigious medals from the European Geosciences Union, American Geophysical Union, and the Geological Society of London, and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.

Michelle Dyson

Michelle Dyson (1989, History), Director General, Adult Social Care, was awarded a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath) for services to Health and Social Care. As part of the senior leadership team for the UK Government’s Department of Health and Social Care, Michelle Dyson is responsible for advising Ministers on policy, for delivering reform into the adult social care system and for operational oversight of the existing adult social care system.

In her previous role as Director of Early Years and Childcare in the Department for Education, she was responsible for delivering the 30 hours childcare programme – 30 hours of free childcare for working parents of 3 and 4 year old across England, which was introduced in September 2017.

Published: 14 January 2025

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