Announcing the 2024-25 Early Career Research Fellows

We are delighted to welcome Ammar Azzouz (top left), Laura Trajber Waisbich (bottom right), Cheng Lu (bottom left) and Pu Yang (top right) to the Skoll community. The Early Career Research Fellowship supports early-career academic researchers at Oxford who generate knowledge that accelerates social impact.

Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023), with a foreword by Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent. Azzouz is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. He has written for a wide range of platforms including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman. 

Cheng Lu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, Saïd Business School. His research interests span the domains of social entrepreneurship and innovation, civil society organisations, corporate social responsibility, and state-society relations. Cheng is working with Paulo Savaget, who holds a joint appointment at Saïd Business School and the Department of Engineering Science, on a project investigating the legitimation of social enterprises in China. Cheng earned his master’s degree in Political Science from Peking University and completed his PhD in Management at the University of Edinburgh. 

Laura Trajber Waisbich is a Departmental Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme, at the Latin American Centre in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her work revolves around various issues such as foreign policy, international development cooperation, policy diffusion, state-society relations, and open government. Her current research projects focus on the disputes surrounding the growing role of rising powers countries like China, India, and Brazil in the current geopolitical landscape and on multi-level governance in the Amazon. Prior to joining Oxford, she accumulated over 10 years of experience working for civil society organisations and think tanks, primarily in Brazil and the UK.

Pu Yang is a researcher for the Climate Compatible Growth project at Energy and Power Group. Her research intersects climate economics and sustainable finance, exploring how social impact can be monetised to motivate more ambitious climate actions. Her current focus is to measure the social economic benefits of the energy transition to promote climate-compatible growth in Kenya, Zambia, and Vietnam, aiming to harmonise economic development with environmental sustainability.

Each Early Career Research Fellow will be paired with a faculty mentor from Saïd Business School and may also choose to work with a second faculty mentor from another department.

ECRFs will also be invited to share their research through participating in and leading Insights for Action research seminars or other speaking engagements and contributing to the Centre’s action-oriented research agenda through research outputs such as working papers, articles, podcast episodes, and blogs.

Find out more about the fellowship and when to apply for next year's cohort.