Alexes Mes

Alexes Mes

Position

Enrichment Student

Cohort year

2024

Partner Institution

Bio

Alexes Mes is a PhD candidate in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, concentrating on human migration. She gained two MSc degrees from the University of Cape Town, the first in Theoretical Physics where she worked in Quantum Chromodynamics and the second in Applied Mathematics here she focused on understanding Brownian motion in an AdS/CFT framework. She has been an Allan Gray Orbis fellow since 2017 and, in 2019, she became a Mandela Rhodes scholar. Alexes believes strongly in accessible science, both in terms of volunteering and in an interest in scientific communication.

Research interests

Alexes focuses on 'Why people move'? Her PhD research explores what promotes human migration by using spatial methods to reconstruct regional geographic variations in movement and examine potential drivers determining observed, locally complex, differences in dispersal processes. Understanding the different underlying processes behind human expansion can have implications in elucidating the nuances in interactions between migrant populations and incumbent communities; between different subsistence strategies; and between humans and their environments. Alexes is also interested in the quality of the archaeological record. There is a problem in Archaeology: the dimensionality, resolution, sampling interval and scope of the data massively constrains the types of questions that can be answered about our past. Beyond being acknowledged, there remains missing groundwork between those that work on mathematical models to describe social and demographic dynamics, and our ability to match this with the data and quantify the uncertainties arising from this process. Other fields, besides Archaeology, are plagued by noisy and incomplete data and biases. The Turing Enrichment scheme excites her by the possibility of being exposed to a broad range of intersectional research and methodologies from different domains.