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Catz Fellow Receives 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Culture

St Catherine’s College is delighted to recognise the contribution of Professor Ashok Handa, Catz Fellow in Clinical Medicine and Tutor for Graduates until January 2026, to the Medical Humanities Research Hub (MedHum), which has recently received the 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Culture.

Based within TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), MedHum was recognised for its exceptional efforts to cultivate a positive, inclusive, and collaborative research environment. The interdisciplinary hub supports research on health, illness, and medicine – in sum, advocating for a greater understanding of these fields, thereby transcending traditional biomedical boundaries.

Professor Handa plays a key role in connecting clinical practice with the humanities, contributing his lifelong medical expertise to collaborative projects which explore how culture, history, and ethics consistently shape patient experience and professional identity. Across its activities and offerings, MedHum brings together patients, clinicians, and scholars in pursuit of a deeply interdisciplinary approach to understanding health and medicine.

Professor Handa comments: “I am lucky to work with so many talented colleagues from the humanities in creating a bridge between their work and the medical sciences and patients. This work is supported by The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice at St Catherine’s College.”

Recent initiatives have included ethnographic workshops on mental health, major conferences on artificial intelligence and human identity, and writing groups for early-career researchers. The hub has also succeeded in expanding its international reach and reputation through key Visiting Fellowships, such as that with AfOx Visiting Fellow Dr Tolulope Osayomi, who delivered events on African medical research and global COVID-19 trajectories.

Led by Professor Erica Charters (Faculty of History), the MedHum committee includes scholars from across Oxford’s divisions and departments – including tutors, professors, and early-career researchers. As one clinical tutor explains: “Studying and interpreting humanities-based content equips medical students to develop a professional identity that will sustain them amidst the complexities, changes, and ambiguities they will encounter.”

The Vice-Chancellor’s Award acknowledges both the hub’s meaningful impact on academic culture, and its commitment to advancing interdisciplinary research and public engagement. This achievement should be understood as affirming the importance of integrating humanities insight into the study of medicine and health – a corrective, as MedHum describes, to the common assumption that medical innovation lies solely in laboratories or with physicians.

We congratulate Professor Handa and his colleagues on this achievement, and we look forward to following their increasingly impactful work at the intersection of clinical teaching and the health humanities.

Professor Ashok Handa

Professor Ashok Handa is Catz Fellow in Clinical Medicine and Tutor for Graduates. He is also Professor of Vascular Surgery and Director of Teaching in Surgery, and the Co-Lead for various university-based and national medical institutions, including the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care and the Oxford Global Surgery Research Group.

In his role at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Science, he serves as Honorary Consultant Vascular Surgeon, oversees the surgical curriculum and educational strategy at the University of Oxford, and leads the Oxford Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (OxAAA) Study, while sustaining wide-ranging research collaborations and interests across cardiovascular imagining, biomedical engineering, and global health.

For more information about MedHum’s mission and values, please see here. Further information about the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Culture is available here.

Image courtesy of John Cairns