Anna Yakovleva

Anna also helped to provide training in Oxford Nanopore Covid-19 sequencing to local healthcare staff in her spare time. With their assistance, the Institute was able to sequence 26 patient samples, marking the first time the virus had been sequenced in a lab in Ukraine since the pandemic began. They plan to follow up their work with a collaborative article in PLOS One, and they have also successfully applied for a $60,000 grant to continue supporting local Covid-19 sequencing capacity.

Anna visiting one of the Alliance For Public Health’s HIV outreach mobile laboratories to help plan the installation of “Working on this project allowed me to bring all of sequencing equipment my knowledge to bear on the challenge of working with infectious disease in a low-income country,” said Anna.

“We worked alongside local organisations, scientists, outreach teams, nurses, doctors, and other staff members in a fully collaborative process, resulting in a sharing of expertise and transfer of knowledge and the publication of two joint papers.”

Anna donated the portable gel electrophoresis machine purchased with her award to the L.V. Gromashevskiy Institute at the end of her placement. The instrument is now being used regularly for sequencing Covid-19, HIV and Hepatitis C. The next phase of their work will involve completing work on assembling their mobile laboratory before embarking on a pilot mobile, real-time molecular epidemiology screening project in Kyiv in summer 2022.

RECIPIENTS OF THE 2021 THATCHER DEVELOPMENT AWARDS

• Maria Rotaru (2020, PPE) received £1100 to support a project aimed at finding ways to fight for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals on access to education and clean water through policy research, design and analysis. She undertook a six-week policy research internship with Somerville

JRF Dr Hussam Hussein at the Oxford Martin School, followed by five weeks of volunteering with the

Romanian education NGO “Together”. • Benjamin Freeborn (2020, BA Law) received £1558 to volunteer with Movement on the Ground in the

Vial refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios. He is returning in Easter 2022 to conduct a trial of

VitaeGum, a vitamin-infused chewing gum aimed at tackling malnutrition and improving oral health. • Aneeska Sohal (2020, MSc Modern South Asian Studies) used her award of £1000 to develop a second series of her successful student mental health podcast, All Things Mental Health • Jamie Walker (2019, Biology) was awarded £1448 to support a peat restoration project in the local Lye

Valley nature reserve, a rare wetland habitat which is being restored by a team of students, academics and local residents.

• In collaboration with the Ukrainian NGO Alliance for Public Health and the L.V. Gromashevskiy

Institute for public health, Anna Yakovleva (2020, Graduate Entry Medicine) used her award of £996 to allow her to help develop HIV/HCV Oxford Nanopore based genetic sequencing protocols suitable for use in low resource, hard to reach environments, enabling surveillance and research into virus transmissions in mobile populations like refugees.

CARBON TAX: APOPULAR ANSWER FOR A GLOBAL PROBLEM?

JULIETTE CAUCHETEUX OXFORD THATCHER SCHOLAR

The climate crisis is humanity’s biggest existential threat. Engineer turned economist Juliette Caucheteux (2021, DPhil Economics, Oxford Thatcher Scholar) embraces knowledge from across disciplines to develop new policy ideas that can both reduce carbon emissions and, crucially, win popular support in a western liberal democracy. Before coming to Oxford, I studied maths, physics and engineering in France, followed by public administration at the LSE. My varied academic background helped me realise two fundamental truths: that climate justice is the defining question of our age; and that the answers lie at the juncture of science, politics, and economics.

Now, as an economics researcher and a member of an interdisciplinary academic community at Somerville College, I am in the perfect environment to get to the heart of our climate crisis inertia. In my DPhil thesis, I will propose a way to get the wheels moving again through a carbon tax.

The crux of the problem was perfectly summarised by an unlikely candidate: US President George H. W. Bush. When warned by environmentalists in 1992 ahead of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that the United States was the biggest energy consumer and polluter on the planet, President George H. W. Bush simply replied: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.” Bush’ avowal belies a certain inconvenient truth: climate change was caused by the search for productivity, profits, growth, and therefore lowering carbon emissions to the requisite level must inevitably mean at least some change to our way of life. This makes for a distinctly unappealing offering for democratic leaders seeking election. Rather than promising to hit citizens with a higher cost of living and higher taxes to pay for new infrastructure and climate change mitigation, many politicians opt for