Four academics have been recommended for election as unofficial Fellows of Gonville & Caius College following a Research Fellowship competition which had an exceptional standard of entries.
The four researchers are scheduled to begin their four-year Research Fellowships from October 2025. Caius alumnus Zaki Rehman (History 2017) in History and Shruti Iyer in Law were chosen through the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences competition, and Boyao Liu and Gonzalo Villa, both Physics, were chosen through the Sciences competition.
The College wishes to thank Professor Joachim Whaley and Professor Kay-Tee Khaw CBE for chairing the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fellowships Sub-Committee and the Sciences Research Fellowships Sub-Committee, respectively, and the secretaries of the sub-committees, Dr Rebecca Sugden and Professor Sir Alan Fersht.
The Research Fellowship competition takes place annually, with the application process open in September. For more information, visit: Research Fellowship Competition | Gonville & Caius
Pictured, clockwise from top right: Zeki Rehman (History 2017), Boyao Liu, Gonzalo Villa, Shruti Iyer.
More about the competition winners:
Zaki Rehman (History 2017)
Zaki works on the relationship between Islam and the West at the intersection of history, political thought, and law. He studied history at Caius as an undergraduate, matriculating in 2017, before moving to Oxford for a Masters and then DPhil, which he is currently completing. Alongside the DPhil, Zaki has also spent time as a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, a Platzman Fellow at the University of Chicago, and working with both the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford) and the UK Ministry of Justice.
Shruti Iyer (Law)
Shruti is a legal anthropologist, completing her DPhil at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. Her current work examines how moral values shape welfare policy in contemporary India. She focuses on how people's movements, state bureaucrats, and informal workers give meaning to, negotiate, and contest social protection programmes. Her doctoral research has been supported by a Rhodes Scholarship, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Shruti holds an LL.B in Politics, Philosophy and Law from King's College London, and an MPhil in Socio-Legal Research from St Antony's College, Oxford.
Boyao Liu (Physics)
Boyao is a condensed matter physicist specialising in atom scattering technology. He obtained his BS degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and completed his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His doctoral research is focused on the behaviour of phonons – the quantum mechanical representation of lattice vibrations – using the unique helium spin echo technique.
Gonzalo Villa (Physics)
Gonzalo studies the very early universe through the lens of string theory. His research interests range from describing the first instants of life of the cosmos, where string theory predicts physics to be different than at length scales currently accessible to experiments, to studying observational signatures of these novel effects, particularly gravitational waves. He holds a BA in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and is pursuing a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Downing College, Cambridge, where he received a MASt.
