Economics

Dr Murphy is Lucy Cavendish College Bye Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics, Mphil and Undergraduate supervision, Faculty of Education.

Mary's focus is environmental and social justice. As an entrepreneur she has specific experience in the production, consumption, and distribution of food and how it mirrors social, economic, and environmental health. She is particularly interested in the intersections of politics, economics, and society in the sustainability field. Her academic work is framed by the philosophy of critical realism, social ontology and is underpinned by the theories of semiotics, World Risk, reflexivity, and structure and agency.

She has researched the negotiations process in Northern Ireland and South Africa.  She established an Amnesty International Chapter during The Troubles in Northern Ireland and worked in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.  She supported former Minister for Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Mohammed Valli Moosa, to bring economic and social data to secure the banning of the 17-micron disposable plastic shopping bag in 2000.

She has developed and presented a postgraduate course in environmental education, designed and delivered curriculum-based school education programmes, developed public pedagogy campaigns and methods including interactive workshops, talks, videos, broadcast media, documentaries and story.

Mary's entrepreneurial background includes the establishment, in 2006, of FullCycle, a company centred on the food system from cradle to grave, which sold sustainable environmental solutions, particularly in food waste reduction to clients in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. She owned and managed FullCycle for twelve years until 2018 and, in that time, oversaw a significant decrease in climate change impact as well as a sizeable increase in turnover for her clients.

She is trained in carbon foot printing and ISO 4001 methodologies and has worked with a range of transnational and intergovernmental organisations including the Global Environment Facility, WSSD, COP and UNESCO.

She is presently working on an emerging field of research called hydro-sociology, which has at its core an understanding of the hydrological system and the human system as inherently linked. The project opens up the possibility for a comparative view of how young people in South Africa and the UK access and develop their sense of citizenship through working connections with waterways. They are applying ethnographic tools to explore in-depth the ontological and epistemological position of young people and their understanding, relationship, and development as global citizens.  Relationships that are shaped by the global hydro-socio-political debates.

I come from Sarandë, Albania, and had worked there as a translator and in banking, before coming to the UK to study for A-levels.  Lucy Cavendish has a special way of making students feel welcome and supported, and it’s a great place to meet interesting people: everyone is open to sharing and discussing their past experiences. The Economics Tripos at Cambridge is quite unique and has made me love my subject even more. It is very wide and the most interesting feature is the combination of the qualitative and quantitative aspects; I used to be more into the quantitative part of Economics, but I have really come to enjoy the history and politics papers. Lucy Cavendish Economists have a very experienced Director of Studies and I have been lucky to have had some of the best supervisors. The supervision groups are small and you get a lot of individual attention from your supervisors - this is one of the perks of being in a small college.

Gracelin is a Lucy Cavendish College alumna. Her PhD was titled 'Essays on the economic and financial challenges facing South Africa’s commodity sector'. She was a grateful recipient of a full scholarship from the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust that is awarded to one candidate across the university biennially. She works with both national governments and regional intergovernmental bodies such as the Southern Africa Development Secretariat and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.  In addition to working for the World Bank, she is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) at the University of Cape Town.

Prior to coming to Cambridge, she was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship through the US State Department in South Africa, worked on a public health grant that aims to reduce the disparity in access to quality healthcare between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, and spent 3 years teaching low-income underserved students in Houston (who went on to become first-generation college students).

Yujiang River Chen works on labour economics, urban economics and micro-econometrics. His research is largely empirical and policy-oriented, focusing on the impact of minimum wages on income inequality and unemployment, the agglomeration and sorting of human capital, models of city structure that highlight the rise of the sharing economy, and the application of machine learning techniques in econometrics. He received his BA in Economics from Peking University in China, and his MPhil in Economic Research and PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. He is currently the Bevil Mabey College Lecturer in Economics at St Catharine’s College.