Directory

My ultimate career goal is to become a leading researcher in the development and use of geographic information technologies, as applied to the environmental and social sciences. Having spent my childhood in Papua New Guinea, I have always been fascinated with nature and my unique life experiences have strongly connected me to social needs. I believe that environmental problems are highly complex and require a multidisciplinary approach to solve them. By pursuing my proposed studies at the University of Cambridge, I hope to gain the technical expertise and practical experience needed to specialize in the application of such technologies in a socioeconomic and public health context. Following my PhD studies, I hope to continue in academia and to teach students, while participating in consultancy work in developing countries. By pursuing these interests, I hope to make a valuable contribution to the related areas of environmental protection, conservation, and sustainable development.

I am honoured to be part of the Gates community and to be given the opportunity to pursue my further studies here at Cambridge. I will be returning to Singapore to work in the prison service upon graduation and hope to use the knowledge gained in my course to improve the offender rehabilitation programmes in the prisons back home.

I grew up in Florianópolis, southern Brazil, where I graduated as a psychologist at UFSC. I moved to Rio de Janeiro for a master's degree in Sociology and Anthropology at UFRJ, shifting my focus to the impact of illegal gold mining on Indigenous Territory. Since 2020 I lived in northern amazon combining humanitarian action with field research. I have been working for UN Agencies and indigenous organisations and I've witnessed a great deal of extreme violence on the region; strikingly, most of it resulted from good intentions combined with anthropological ignorance. During my master's, I researched the topic of indigenous suicide focusing on ethnological concept of the amerindian body. The northern Amazonian region has faced an ongoing political transformation: from highly segregated and autonomous political villages to highly associated interethnic organisations. Today new indigenous political forms of action and creative institutions in situations of contested sovereignty arise as responses to predatory extractivism such as ilegal mining, paramilitary forces and State control.Building on recent debates inspired by Amerindian thought, I will investigate interconnected concepts such as body and sovereignty; freedom and dependency.

Previous Education

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Social Anthropology 2023
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Psychology 2017
Universita Degli Studi Bologna Antropologia Culturale

Over years of studying literature, first as an undergraduate at St. Stephen's College, Delhi and then as a Master's student at the University of Oxford, I have developed an appreciation for the narratives that often go unheard. My work considers independent literary expression in India and turns to the ways in which writing and documentation can transform how we occupy, understand, and move in the world. By looking to minority voices, through scholarship and curatorial work, I hope to bring attention to the politics of artistic practice, building spaces that are are aware both of their potential and their responsibility.

Previous Education

University of Oxford World Literatures in English 2017
University of Delhi English 2016

I work on integrating vertebrate herbivory into models describing how forests function. Such models, which have typically overlooked the significant impacts of large mammalian herbivores on their environments, can be extended beyond their standard conservation applications to predicting how forests may sequester carbon to limit climate warming.

Previous Education

UNITECH International Society, Switzerland UNITECH International Fellowship 2002
Imperial College London MEng Chemical Engineering, First Class Honours 2002
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands International MSc Programme, Chemical Technology 2001

Links

http://www.linkedin.com/in/monceftanfour

Evelyn Tang joined the faculty in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University, in 2021. Previously, she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and before that, an Africk Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the group of Dani Bassett. In 2015, she received her PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with Xiao-Gang Wen on novel topological states in quantum electronic systems. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BS from Yale University. Tang is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Scialog award, a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship, and a Gates Cambridge scholarship.

Previous Education

Yale University B.S. Physics 2007

Being born in the financial capital of India, Mumbai, and being raised by entrepreneurs has fundamentally shaped the trajectory of my intellectual interests. Early on, I saw that decisions have to be made pragmatically, to account for all possibilities and creatively, to adapt to unknown unknowns. I think this is the core of my motivation for studying Innovation, Strategy and Organisation : to help inform decisions of real businesses across a range of sectors, to glean broad insights so that diverse companies can better tackle the seismic shifts technological evolution brings. I aspire to contribute more perceptively to the conversation that I have been part of ever since I was a child. I aim to understand how businesses can scale effectively to leverage the capacity of distinctive companies that want to make a dent in the world. Studying PPE (BSc) has given me an interdisciplinary toolbox, supplemented by my experiences in working in the Indian parliament, a national industry body, a research database on governance mechanisms in institutions and at a venture capital fund. I am eager deploy both my theoretical and heuristic experiences in my future work.

Previous Education

King's College London (University of London) PPE 2024

While trying to decide what to study someone told me ‘Choose whatever allows you to help others more’. Throughout my studies in Mathematics and Physics in Granada, I discovered what a crucial role we have in improving our world and our understanding of it. I learnt to see them as two inseparable tools to explain nature and address some of the most fundamental questions about the Universe we live in. I am particularly keen to those arising in General Relativity, which deal with something as basic and yet as profound as the model for space and time. I am eager to learn as much as possible during my PhD to tackle some of the many fascinating open problems in the field. Along these years, I luckily came across wonderful teachers, who have made me the scientist I am today, thanks to whom I love what I study. They awoke in me the desire to one day have the same impact on future generations. Thus, I also hope to get training as an educator and science communicator, so that I can share my passion for what I do and encourage others to see the beauty and power of Mathematics and Physics. I feel immensely grateful for the chance to take the next step of my journey at Cambridge, and I am excited to join this passionate and inspiring community.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Mathematics 2023
Universidad de Granada Physics 2022
Universidad de Granada Mathematics 2022

I am a medievalist particularly interested in the reception of antiquity and the commentary practice in the Middle Ages, with a special focus on the traditions of Dante Commentary. I am currently revising my new critical edition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary (1385-96) on Dante’s Commedia for publication (Rome: Salerno Editrice). With Ambrogio Camozzi, I have recently concluded a monograph (Brepols, 2018) on the oldest ‘Florentine’ version of the life of Alexander the Great (c. 1350), witnessed by a lavishly illuminated manuscript now at the Jagiellonian Library, Kraków. I have also started to work on my next book-length project, ‘Dante and Late Medieval Pisa’, whose aim is to explore the vibrant and influential reception of Dante’s Commedia in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Pisa, especially in relation to the city’s longstanding political and cultural rivalry with Florence. In the field of Neo-Latin Studies, I am currently preparing the critical edition of XV Century anonymous Breve Compendium et utile super tota Dantis Allegherii Comedia.

Previous Education

University of Pisa MA Italian 2005

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Physics 2023
King's College London (University of London) Physics with Theoretical Phys. 2022

I will be undertaking an MPhil in Environment, Society & Development in order to build upon the experience I have of working in the field of development in Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, and the UK. My focus will be on sustainable development and the complex dynamics that result from the interaction between people and their environment.

The evolutionary introduction of language in the human species has given us a unique ability to cooperate in large and highly adaptable social groups. Our capacity for language allows us to live according to imagined cultural orders, such as the legal and economic frameworks that govern civic life. These frameworks exist in our shared imagination and are sustained through communication networks, linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. These shared beliefs shape our societies and our world, and form the basis of study of most of the humanities. History has shown us the great consequences and opportunities of our shared beliefs, which determine our cultural values and prejudices. By observing and understanding language structure, we learn more about ourselves and the world which we create. We also learn about the mechanisms which will be required to create the kind of world we would like to live in.

Links

http://inspiredialogue.org

As an undergraduate at Duke University, I developed a keen interest in utilizing computational models to investigate the underlying mechanisms of human disease. I resolved to concentrate my career on connecting biology, mathematics, and computer science, with a focus on applications to human health. Shortly after graduating from Duke with a BSc in Computational Biology, I joined the laboratory of Dr. Francis Collins at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), where I studied the molecular underpinnings of diabetes using genetic and genomic techniques. While at the NIH, I became acutely aware of the health inequities that persist worldwide, and I pursued training to prepare myself for a career focused on addressing systemic health inequities. During my doctoral training at Cambridge, I plan to combine my interests in human disease and health inequities to study the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes (T2D) across diverse ancestries. It is my hope that my doctoral research will enhance the treatment and prevention of T2D for all people. I am immensely grateful and humbled to join the Gates Cambridge community, and I look forward to learning from the other scholars across diverse disciplines.

Previous Education

Duke University Computational Biology 2018

I was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica where I navigated two cultures of care. This foundational experience, coupled with the knowledge and understanding gained from research and personal healthcare challenges, has shaped my passion for cultivating high-quality healthcare in the Caribbean. As an undergraduate studying Anthropology and Global Health at Princeton University, I developed an appetite for understanding the health narratives of people and contexts of diseases. During my MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society, I plan to conduct research on maternal health, violence and humanized birthing practices in low resource contexts. I will explore the effects of obstetric violence on maternal and child health and prioritize quality of care for women during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. I believe that it is essential to center the voices of women in an effort to reimagine birthing possibilities and will take a multidisciplinary approach to my work. I am honored to be joining the Gates Cambridge community and look forward to approaching global health as a collective effort. 

Previous Education

Princeton University Medical Anthropology 2023

A love of the outdoors, especially mountainous regions, combined with an intense curiosity about how such landscapes and their constituent rocks form, made geology an obvious career choice. During my time at Cambridge I will work on reconstructing, via mineral assemblage modeling, the metamorphic history of a continental crust terrain in the western Alps, as it was subducted into the mantle and subsequently returned to the Earth's surface. Aspiring to an academic career, I hope that through research, I am able to advance our knowledge of large-scale Earth processes - still so poorly understood.

As an undergraduate, I majored in Biochemistry and wrote my thesis in the Department of Pathology at the University of Vermont. There, the interdisciplinary curriculum of the Honors College helped to channel my interests in medicine that lay outside of the biomedical sciences. In becoming involved with health access initiatives, I gained an appreciation for how social science disciplines can inform healthcare policy and practice. History, anthropology, philosophy and sociology all have an amazing intellectual power to describe and contextualize issues in health and medicine, but there is often a decades-long lapse between what is written about and what is practiced. In order to address the social injustices and inequalities that persist in our current healthcare system, I believe the everyday practice of medicine must be directly informed by rigorous engagement with social science research. During my MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society, I hope to both develop a professional competency with the conversations in this field and work to translate this expertise into my future medical practice. And, through continuous advocacy, I seek to integrate these developments into healthcare systems.

Previous Education

University of Vermont