What differentiates the truly great people from the rest? I believe it is standing tall in the face of adversity. Growing up in one of the biggest cities (Chennai) in India, I saw the struggle my parents faced to provide a quality education to me. Despite never having been to a university, they strived hard to provide for my university education. To say it in the words of my mom "As humans we don't live forever, why don't we make something that lasts forever". This is my motivation for research. My quest took me from India to the Netherlands and then to UK. Here at Cambridge, I would be working on the entanglement between consciousness and attention. I aim to create a cognitive neuroscience inspired model on the deficits of attention during transitions of consciousness. Further to apply them in patients with attentional deficits like Stroke to predict their recovery prognosis. During my PhD, I would like to combine my expertise in clinical (Maastricht University), cognitive (Radboud University Nijmegen) neuroscience along with my knowledge in mathematical methods (University of Oxford) to provide a holistic approach to the problem in question. I'm truly humbled at this award and would like to thank my friends, family and my teachers for supporting me through thick and thin. I look forward to join the vibrant Gates Cambridge community and contribute my part to this noble cause.
Radboud University Nijmegen
Technical University of Eindhoven