Directory

Previous Education

Columbia University

I am one generation removed from illiteracy, violence against girls, and preventable disease - all prevalent conditions in my family's home country of Sierra Leone. My background moved me to pursue my BA in Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. My concentration on Gender and Violence later led me to the anti-child sexual exploitation space at Google, where I worked on Child Safety Operations. During my time as a partner on this dedicated team, I gained practical knowledge on the challenges that tech giants face. At this unique intersection of human rights law and technology policy, there are engineers, legal professionals, and policymakers making strides in the fight against platform concerns like child exploitation and violent extremism. However, communication, technical proficiency, and prioritization barriers slow our progress towards a unified front against these crimes. At Cambridge, I hope to gain the business acumen to influence leaders in emerging markets to adopt and contribute to industry standards with their localized experiences, so that we as a sector are prepared for evolutions ahead. I am grateful to join the Gates-Cambridge community and to learn from peers who share a commitment to improving lives.

Previous Education

Georgetown University Gender and Violence 2017

Before freshman year, I participated in Princeton University’s Bridge Year Program in Urubamba, Peru. During this time I shadowed a group of archaeologists from the Ministry of Culture seeking to protect Inca terraces from both tourists and local farmers alike. This paradox revealed to me the complicated mechanics of heritage; like museum displays with transparent glass, objects and sites are also encapsulated in political motives and legal decrees that remain publicly invisible. These questions motivated me to pursue Anthropology, with certificates in Archaeology, Latin American Studies, and Urban Studies. Through internships at the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I learned more about creative ways to display history and the complications that arise in doing so. With a research grant I traveled to Peru this fall to explore the aftermath of Yale’s return of artifacts to Cusco after their removal from Machu Picchu in 1911. My research analyzes a new collaborative museum between Yale and the Ministry of Culture, and to unravel the forces that dictate how the story of the artifacts is told. Through an MPhil in Archaeology in the Museum and Heritage Studies track, I hope to better comprehend how heritage politics function in museum practice, and to broaden my understanding of the role of museums both past and present in shaping public perceptions of culture.

Previous Education

Princeton University

I grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe before attending Harvard to study English and French literature. My intellectual commitments have ranged widely, but I remain interested in the novel and its ethical dimensions, as well as related periods in aesthetics, art history, and the history of philosophy. These inclinations have in turn been informed by my extracurricular engagements, including editorial service for journals and magazines, such as the Harvard Advocate, Harvard African, and the Harvard Review of Philosophy. At Cambridge, I plan to follow the MPhil in Criticism and Culture, expanding a project that began with my senior thesis on human-animal relations in the work of J. M. Coetzee. In addition, I would like to broaden my background in philosophy and the history of science. Thereafter, I hope to pursue graduate study in the humanities, alongside projects academic and otherwise on the ethical and political issues concerning our interaction with the natural world.

I received my undergraduate degree in biological anthropology and Spanish from the University of Arkansas. During my time there I conducted field research in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Tanzania as well as lab research on the dental microwear of Brazilian primates to create an extant baseline series for comparison with fossil teeth in order to infer more about the diets of possible human ancestors. I am interested in human evolutionary science and how it can be significant for issues relevant to our existence today. I am excited to continue by education at Cambridge, where I intend to focus on paleoecology and the role environmental dynamics can play in evolutionary processes, including how climate change could have affected human evolution. I also have a great interest in accurate scientific education in public schools, specifically with regard to climate change and evolution. I intend to be an advocate for thorough and unbiased scientific education throughout my career.

At Cambridge I will perform research under the supervision of Prof. Duncan Jodrell, Leader of the Pharmacology and Drug Development Group at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute. My project aims to investigate the chemosensitivity of combinations of anticancer agents using pancreatic cancer cell lines in-vitro. I am excited to begin my MPhil in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics which will best equip me with the tools and knowledge to translate my research in the lab into meaningful innovations in the clinic.

Previous Education

Emory University

Raised in Ghana by parents working in global health, I was inspired to address health inequalities. Moving to Washington D.C., I entered the diverse public school system and learned the convening power of listening and empathy. These values served me well at McGill University where I earned a First Class Honours BA in International Development. Passionate about the role of health in development, my summers were spent working on public health programs in Kenya and Nepal. Outside academics, I played McGill Varsity Soccer and co-founded a social business, Heart City Apparel, which used street art to support homeless charities in 6 countries.After McGill, I worked on global health policy for the Clinton Global Initiative and Population Services International. I then became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon where I lived in a remote village and spearheaded malaria and HIV/AIDS programs. Working alongside and for a community foreign to my own, taught me about leadership in the context of the collective fight for health equality. I learned that the most effective way to improve the lives of others is to build their capacity to empower themselves. I am honoured to be joining the Gates Cambridge community and to be surrounded by scholars who share the common desire to make a positive impact. I hope to harness the MPhil in Public Policy to influence the global health agenda and put communities at the centre of decision-making in the era of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Previous Education

McGill University Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in International Development 2015

Basic Questions on the limits of human knowledge have long found a natural home in philosophy. However, in the twentieth century Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turning and others moved many of the more concrete forms of these questions into the purview of mathematics. It is their work that founded many modern topics in theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. My own research will concern the intersection of these two subjects, asking questions about the limitations of computation (understood very broadly) and the logical languages in which we define our objects of study. Although these subjects obviously influence our understanding of what may be done with ordinary computers, they also have a deep impact on our understanding of computation and definability more generally. Indeed, this marriage of the pure and the applied, combined with the philosophical intrigue behind so many of these questions, makes this topic uniquely interesting.

I am studying for an MPhil in Atomic and Optical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory this year. I am from Southern New Jersey in the US, and graduated in June 2009 with a BS in Physics and minor in Mathematics from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2010 I plan to go to Harvard to study for a PhD in Physics. I also intend to become involved in outreach efforts aimed at getting young people to appreciate and become comfortable with science.

Montana Duke Wilson is an enrolled member of the Gros Ventre tribe of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and is descendent of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Prior to receiving his bachelor degrees, Wilson held commissions as the Deputy Chief Prosecutor, Assistant Public Defender, and Associate Public Defender for the Fort Peck Tribes. Currently, Wilson serves as a Magistrate in the Fort Peck Tribal Court, under the supervision of the Chief Judge. Wilson’s undergraduate education is a BA in Political Science, a BS in Economics, and a minor in Native American Studies from Montana State University Bozeman. Wilson’s education focuses on governing institutions, most notably tribal governments, and how an individual’s decision affects economic development policies. During his undergraduate career, Wilson served as a peer instructor for NASX 497: Study in Federal Indian Law & Policy for the MSU Department of Native American Studies. Furthermore, Wilson served as a research assistant and peer instructor for ECNS 105: The Study in the Economic Way of Thinking and ECNS 206: The Study in the Principles of Macroeconomics for the MSU Department of Agricultural Economics & Economics. In 2016, Wilson was awarded the national Udall Scholarship in the field of tribal public policy for his work on tribal economic development. While at the University of Cambridge, Wilson will pursue an MPhil in Development Studies. Upon the successful completion of his MPhil, Wilson plans to return to his reservation to pursue a career in economic development for his tribes.

Previous Education

Montana State University

While an undergraduate at Lee University, I was introduced to anthropology as a powerful tool of insight and understanding. During my M.Sc. in Social Anthropology at the University College London, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Pentecostal Christians in Appalachia who practice a century-old tradition of handling venomous snakes in the context of worship. During my research, a death in the serpent-handling community captured public interest leading to the community’s engagement with journalists who often framed the community as 'backwards' or 'crazy.' I watched as the church community tried to counter the public narrative surrounding their religious practice. My experiences teaching anthropology at Western Wyoming Community College and at Lee University has only further reinforced my belief that understanding human differences and similarities is invaluable in breaking down barriers of fear and prejudice. Having worked in refugee and migrant communities in India, Egypt and Tennessee, I have seen how fear of differences can ostracize the imaginary ‘other.’ During my Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Cambridge, my research has focused on the ethnographic study of values and the role of hope in motivating action among asylum seekers waiting on asylum procedures in the Aegean. It is by focusing on the values of hope and of an ideal 'good life' that some insight might be gained which situates refugees not as political nor as suffering strangers, but as morally evaluative humans distinctly and deeply informed by their unique cultural experiences.

Previous Education

Lee University
University College London

My deep interest in social behaviour, together with the fact that I come from a developing country, led me to enquire about the ways to overcome the barriers to improve living standards. Realising that economic reasoning helps greatly to solve this puzzle, I decided to pursue a career in Economics. Thanks to the Gates Cambridge Trust I have now the opportunity to refine and expand my expertise on development economics for policy design and to learn among colleagues from a wide cultural spectrum.

What if we could non-invasively characterize individual tumors by their metabolism? That would have substantial effect on the choice of therapy, monitoring therapy response and would thus advance the whole field of precision medicine. Hyperpolarized MRI offers capabilities to watch tumor metabolism by providing molecular probes which are either sensitive to metabolic processes or whose transformation to their metabolic products can be followed in real-time. Despite extensive characterization of those molecular probes, clinical translation is still lacking for most of them. Within my PhD at the department of Radiology in Cambridge I will translate one of those molecular probes into clinics.From my early days as a physics undergraduate in Munich, I was drawn to innovative, interdisciplinary applications of natural sciences, especially to those, having a positive impact on humanity. Further pursuing a master’s degree in Medical Physics, I found passion in the field of hyperpolarized MRI during my thesis, where I developed a molecular pH sensor myself. My ultimate scientific goal is to bridge the gap between research and the clinical translation of promising molecular probes.

Previous Education

Technical University Munich Biomed. Eng. and Med. Physics 2021
Technical University Munich Physics 2018