Directory

My first interaction with theorising gender and violent extremism was prompted by a personal tragedy in 2015 when my cousin fell victim to an Al-Shabaab terrorist attack at Garissa University, Kenya. Two years later, during my post-graduate studies, I wrote two papers on the said theme, including, in my thesis, 'Female Militancy in Terrorist Groups and the African Union Response', where I analysed women's experiences as members of terrorist groups operating in Africa.It is my goal to build a career around gender and violent extremism in Africa. This PhD Program and specifically being part of the Gates Cambridge Community will enable me to achieve this goal by equipping me with the substantive knowledge required to advance my teaching career on gender and armed conflict in Africa, and help me grow its currently-limited profile in the continent. Second, this program will help me galvanise advocacy networks with the diverse calibre of candidates that it will no doubt attract. I would then be able to take this experience and apply it to whatever future capacity I will occupy to advance the overall goal in creating a holistic approach to understanding gender and violent extremism not only in Africa but also the globe over.

Previous Education

Harvard University Law 2017
University Of Nairobi Law 2016

Exposures to dire health conditions in less-fortunate communities domestically and internationally ignited my interest in public health. In college I immersed myself in public-health initiatives by spending summers volunteering at charity clinics in India and working for community-based programs in Managua, Nicaragua. I plan to build upon these experiences by completing a MPhil in Public Health at Cambridge. Through this program, I will gain a deeper understanding of how to apply public health assessment, epidemiological principles, and interventional design to address health disparities. My passion is to utilize this foundation in public health and medicine to tackle emerging health issues in underprivileged communities.

Brady Wagoner is Professor of Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on social and cultural psychology, remembering, social change, and the development of dynamic methodologies. He was the co-creator of the Sir Frederic Bartlett Internet Archive and is an associate editor for the journals Culture & Psychology and Peace & Conflict. He has over eighty publications, including eight books, and has received a number of prestigious professional awards, such as the Sigmund Koch Prize in 2009. His most recent books are The Constructive Mind: Bartlett's Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press), The Psychology of Imagination: History, Theory and New Research Horizons (Info Age), and The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press).

Originally from Berkeley, California, I graduated from Oberlin College and Conservatory with degrees in Classics and Piano Performance and a minor in Historical Performance. I have published articles on the relation between music and visual representation in illustrated manuscripts by Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith, and on the ways the study of performance on historical keyboards can shape interpretation on the modern piano. My primary MPhil research project at Cambridge will consider the dynamic intersections between music, Classical philosophy, and the visual arts. I will investigate how 16th-century Italian composers and philosophers turned to Classical antiquity to develop a unique culture of scientific, musical, and even magical experimentation that had an enduring influence on music theory and architectural practice. I also look forward to participating in the vibrant musical community at Cambridge as a performer on harpsichord and piano.

Links

http://www.danielwaldenpiano.com

I spent my undergraduate years studying Systems Engineering, including summers designing software for Microsoft. To complement my engineering education, I also pursued my interests in philosophy, literature and theater, a pursuit I will continue as an MPhil student at Cambridge studying European Literature and Culture. My research focuses on early modern plays that were re-written during the Romantic movement, with a particular emphasis on Spain (Don Juan) and Germany (Faust). I hope to eventually combine my diverse interests--either as an academic endeavor in which I explore questions at the intersection of engineering, philosophy, and literature (for instance, the philosophy of mind and language implications of developments in artificial intelligence) or as a political endeavor in which I help to shape laws and ethical guidelines related to new technologies. I am thrilled to be a part of the Gates and Cambridge communities as I work to realize this dream.

Originally from Montreal, Canada, I am thrilled to find myself in Cambridge reading for a Master's in Law (LL.M.) with the support of a Gates Scholarship. My studies focus on public international law, in particular human rights and armed conflict, as well as criminal law. I hope to develop a career in either academia, international law or criminal law. My overarching aim is to better understand how law can be used to make the welfare of humanity a practical objective. In recent years, I have worked in the War Crimes Chamber of the State Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, represented refugees and new immigrants at legal aid clinics in Kampala and Montreal, was employed by a law firm in New York, and studied on exchange in Jerusalem. In 2011-2012, I will be a Law Clerk to the Honourable Justice Morris Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Derron Wallace is a sociologist of race, ethnicity and education. He specializes in cross-national studies of structural and cultural inequalities in urban schools across global cities. His current research examines the educational outcomes of Black youth in London and New York City.

Derron is a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Wheaton College (Massachusetts), where he studied sociology and the African diaspora. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, and was awarded American Educational Research Association's Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2015.

With wide-ranging experiences in educational activism, analysis, policy and research, Derron has worked with nomads in Ethiopia, young people with disabilities in Rwanda, immigrant youth in London, economically disadvantaged rural youth in Jamaica, English language learners in Thailand and gifted students in New York City. He served as Special Assistant to the Minister of Education in Rwanda. He also worked as a professional community organizer and consultant with local educational authorities in London.

Aya M. Waller-Bey is a proud Detroiter and Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan where she also received her M.A. in Sociology in 2021. For undergrad, Aya attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., majoring in Sociology, graduating Cum Laude. After graduation, Aya remained at Georgetown working as an Admissions Officer and the Coordinator of Multicultural Recruitment in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. In 2015, she was awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to the University of Cambridge in England—a scholarship awarded to only 40 people in the U.S. each year—and completed her Master of Philosophy in Education.

Aya has shared her insights on postsecondary access, diversity, and inclusion in op-eds in Forbes, Huffington Post U.K., University World News, and the 2016 White House Summit for Advancing Postsecondary Diversity and Inclusion. Her leadership and research have also been highlighted in a PBS Newshour special and the Cambridge Alumni Magazine, the Washington Post, and the University World News. She continued her commitment to access and inclusion through her work with national, not-for-profits and spoke with staffers on the Hill in September 2018 about advancing higher education policy that serves historically underrepresented college students. In March 2019, Aya discussed the experiences of historically disadvantaged students attending elite institutions as a panelist at SXSW Education in Austin, Texas.

Aya’s research on trauma narratives in college essays has also received national and local praise. In March 2020, Aya was selected as a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship awardee—a prestigious fellowship awarded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine aimed to increase the diversity of the national college and university professoriate. Aya received an invitation from the Aspen Center for Physics Virtual Winter Conference 2021 to present her research at the winter conference. She was also one of 20 graduate students to receive the National Center for Institutional Diversity Anti-Racism Summer Research Grant for her dissertation project titled, “I didn’t want it to be a sob story”: Black Student Identity Narration in College Personal Statements” in 2021. She has presented her research at the University of Amsterdam, University of Florida Center for Public Interests Communication frank gathering, and symposiums at the University of Michigan.

Previous Education

Georgetown University

Liz is currently a third-year PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She began her postgraduate career researching relationships between ethnographic museums and Indigenous source communities, focusing specifically on critiques of digital and non-material repatriation and disparities in interpretational authority. Her recent fieldwork in the Alaskan Arctic has led her to broaden her focus to other cultural institutions while interrogating the integration of non-Native settlers into geographically-isolated Native communities. With a specific interest in how Indigenous sovereignty is recognised and exercised within the politically-charged Arctic, her work considers the competing interests of multi-national corporations, settler nation-states, and local Indigenous peoples in determining the future of economic and social development in the North.

Previous Education

Columbia University
Passaic County Community College

I am a computational neuroscientist and data scientist who did his PhD at Cambridge (2011-15).

Njoki is an assistant Professor in International Relations Department at Kenya's oldest private university United States International University-Africa. She was previously a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Politics and International Studies department (POLIS). Her research focus is on the tensions between international and local practices of transitional justice in Kenya. At Cambridge, Njoki was the founding president of the Cambridge Eastern African Society (CamEAS) and and the Black Cantabs project which aims to curate the achievements of black Cambridge alumni at www.blackcantabs.com. She is also a co-founder of the African Society of Cambridge University (ASCU).She is an alumnus of the Africa Leadership Centre (ALC) at King's College London. Njoki worked in the non-profit sector in Kenya at Kenya Human Rights Commission and at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. Her research interests include critical transitional justice, critical theory, politics of Africa, African feminisms and development of political thought from Africa.

Previous Education

University Of Nairobi
King's College London (University of L

I was born in Beijing and moved to Chicago with my parents at age 9. Because of my immigrant background and love of history, I'm studying immigrant participation during the 1960s in Great Britain and France at Cambridge in the MPhil program in Modern European History. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I studied History, Economics, and French, focusing on the history of empire and decolonization in the twentieth century. Outside the classroom, I edited for the undergraduate history research journal, sang in an all-female choir, and danced in different shows on campus. I hope to continue some of my extracurricular interests in England. After my time at Cambridge, I hope to use what I learned to pursue a career in legal academia and work in an international capacity on improving the rights of immigrant populations, particularly socioeconomic rights like education. I am excited to be part of the Gates community!