Directory

Tara Patricia Cookson is a Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor of Gender, Development and Global Public Policy at the University of British Columbia's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and the cofounder of Ladysmith, a feminist research consultancy that helps international organizations collect, analyze and take action on gender data. In her role at Ladysmith she has led evidence-driven projects for UN Women, UNICEF, the International Labour Organization, Global Affairs Canada, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Facebook, among others. She is also author of the award winning book Unjust Conditions: Women's Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs, based on the research she conducted while a Gates Cambridge Scholar and member of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge (2011-2015).

Links

https://ladysmithcollective.com
https://sppga.ubc.ca/profile/tara-cookson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/taracookson

During my undergraduate studies in geophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I developed a fascination with glaciers and the Arctic, a passion that has taken me to Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland and Iceland. My research has focused on glaciology and Arctic hydrology, including studying surface strain rates on the Taku Glacier in Southeast Alaska through the Juneau Icefield Research Program and examining trends in the timing of Siberian river ice breakup using satellite imagery in UNC’s Global Hydrology Lab. After visiting the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2013, I became particularly interested in studying the dramatic retreat of Greenland’s large outlet glaciers and the complex processes that govern their flow. At Cambridge, I will pursue my MPhil in Polar Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, where I will focus on researching feedbacks between basal hydrology and flow in tidewater glaciers in West Greenland. Through the use of mathematical modeling of glacier flow, I seek to better understand how Greenland’s glaciers are responding to climate warming as part of efforts to improve sea level rise predictions. I am honored and excited to join the diverse Gates Cambridge community and to engage in the groundbreaking polar research and outreach at the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Previous Education

University of North Carolina

During my time at Cambridge I researched children in the Upper Palaeolithic. I looked at art, especially finger flutings done in France and Spain to determine the ages and biological sex of the artists. Hopefully this will also lead to a better understanding of children's lives in the Upper Palaeolithic. I am also very interested and active in archaeological outreach for youths, hoping to foster their interest in the past.

I currently live in Wiltshire, UK, and work for English Heritage as a curator, hoping to inspire people to learn more about the past and preserve heritage.

Previous Education

University of York MSc, Early Prehistory 2008
Columbia University B.A., Ancient Studies 2007

I am broadly interested in using ecological and mathematical approaches to answer questions in infectious disease epidemiology. I did my masters and PhD in Dr. Caroline Trotter’s group in the Disease Dynamics Unit at Cambridge, where I applied mathematical modelling techniques and traditional epidemiological analysis to better understand and reduce the burden of meningitis in the African meningitis belt. In 2019 I joined the Vaccine Epidemiology Research Group led by Professor Nick Grassly at Imperial College, where I study the epidemiology of vaccine-derived polioviruses.

Previous Education

Princeton University

Links

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/l.cooper
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lvcooper

I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, spending my weekends camping on mountaintops and coastlines, with my amazing parents, little brother, and friends, staring up at the starry night next to a warm fire. I always yearned to learn more about the night sky, a path that eventually led me to my undergraduate study of Astrophysics at Harvard University. I have researched several aspects of observational cosmology, the study and measurement of the earliest signals from the universe, and what they tell us about how the universe began, and its eventual fate. I have often partnered with several organizations to create outreach programs in which we teach young students, both in Boston and Puerto Rico, about the cosmic and human past, hoping to instill intellectual curiosity and empower them to pursue their passions. At the same time, I strove to understand humanity’s more immediate past by completing a secondary field in Archaeology, inspired by the questions I held concerning who had previously stared at the stars from those same coastlines in Puerto Rico. Embarking on an MPhil in Archeology of the Americas, with a focus on Archeoastronomy, I hope to illuminate the deep astronomical traditions of Ancient American peoples, and how these help inform our own conception of the universe, our history, and ourselves.

Previous Education

Harvard University Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) Astrophysics - Physics 2019

I have a profound belief in the transformative potential of literature, and as a Gates scholar I will be researching literature’s ability to both reflect and evoke societal change. I was born and raised in Belgium, but my love for literature took me to the University of Cambridge, where I first became acquainted with feminist literary theory. As a master’s student in Gender at the London School of Economics, I researched the role of narrative in the #MeToo movement and gained a lasting interest in the politics and ethics of representation. My doctoral research will focus on feminist revisionist literature, the genre in which contemporary authors subvert, adapt, or otherwise engage with canonical texts in order to highlight female voice and subjectivity. Through my work, I hope not only to shed light on a popular strand of contemporary women’s writing, but also to research the epistemic function of this literature, as I believe that the stories we tell affect what our social, cultural, and political movements can achieve. I am very honoured to be joining the Gates Cambridge community, and I am looking forward to learning from and collaborating with like-minded scholars.

Previous Education

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Catholic Universit Western Literature 2021
London School of Economics & Political Science (Un Gender 2020
University of Cambridge English 2018

I became interested in studying the relationship between politics and photography while living in Buenos Aires in 2008. As a Comparative Literature major at Cornell University, I studied photography in both fine-art classes and as a mode of literary, political, and historical analysis. In 2012, I travelled to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay to research the repurposed family photo album in the context of historical memory in these countries. Between 2014 and 2016, I studied between Spain, Portugal and Scotland for the Erasmus Mundus Master’s course Crossways in Cultural Narratives. My MA dissertation analysed the photomontages of German-born Argentine artist Grete Stern. With Dr. Joanna Page at the Centre for Latin American Studies, I will investigate the history of photomontage in Argentina and shed light on this technique’s prevalence in contemporary visual culture of the Southern Cone.

Previous Education

University of St Andrews Cultural Narratives 2016
Cornell University Latin American Studies 2014

Previous Education

Harvard University EdM Mind, Brain & Education 2003
Brown University ScB Cognitive Neuroscience 2002

I am fascinated by the potential of emerging biomedical tools to treat new diseases. A native of Massachusetts, I graduated from Harvard University, where I studied neuroscience in several contexts, including retinal disease in premature infants, nontraditional symptoms in Alzheimer's disease patients, and synaptic patterning in the developing brain. More recently, I conducted thesis research into how young neurons decide to assemble specific circuits in the outer retina. While teaching children throughout the US and Southeast Asia, I have also witnessed the personal challenges of healthcare access around the world. These experiences have guided my belief that biomedical research must combine technical progress with new modes of development and distribution. At Cambridge I will pursue an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise, which will prepare me to address these questions through a career in medicine. Outside my studies I hope to continue my other interests in jazz music, youth coaching, and woodworking.

Previous Education

Harvard University

Previous Education

University of Notre Dame B.A. Political Science 2012

I am committed to integrating theoretical, empirical and advocacy work on punishment and incarceration in order to contribute to a more humane justice system. I will be researching adolescents’ perceptions of fairness and the legitimacy of power in youth prisons, focusing on how these perceptions impact adolescents' well-being while they are incarcerated. My goal is, as an academic, to examine the broader implications of social policy, but also to tell, through empirical research, the stories of those most affected by the social policy of crime and punishment.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MPhil in Criminology 2007
Yale University 2001

At Cambridge, I pursued an MPhil studying the parasite responsible for the tropical disease known as human African trypanosomiasis. Since then, I have attended medical school at Johns Hopkins and am now a resident in ocular surgery at Harvard. I remain passionate about global health, with current research involving trachoma (a potentially blinding disease seen primarily in African and Asia) and cataract surgery in India.

Previous Education

Virginia Military Institute

Links

http://www.innoviatech.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-craigwood-b3324113

I was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania, where I also graduated from the University of Bucharest in 2004 after reading Latin and Romanian. I also completed a master’s in linguistics, after which I obtained a permanent position as a researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy. At the same time I got involved in journalism as a correspondent at the Romanian Parliament and Presidency. However, the turning point in my career was the year that I spent at Cambridge (2009 / 2010) as a visiting student, carrying out research on rhetoric and discourse analysis. Then I decided to return to my former passion about classics and to build up an academic career in this field. My PhD project at Cambridge is about Latin rhetoric: it consists in a commentary on the “Pro Flacco”, one of Cicero’s least known and appreciated speeches. The choice of the topic was motivated by the following factors: a) there is, surprisingly, no extensive and up-to-date academic discussion in classical scholarship on this important speech either in English or in any other language; b) the “Pro Flacco” is a key source for understanding Roman imperialism in general and the complicated relationship between Rome and Asia Minor in 1st c. B.C. in particular; c) this speech exposes all the xenophobic clichés which were present in the cultural space of Rome at the end of the Republic and the way they were exploited in politics and oratory.

Originally from Irvine, CA, I completed my BS in Psychobiology at UCLA, where I studied the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation. At Cambridge, I am exploring the neural mechanisms of human motivation and decision making under the supervision of Prof Trevor Robbins in the Department of Experimental Psychology. In particular, I’m investigating how the neuromodulator serotonin influences decision making in social contexts. Following my PhD, I plan to conduct postdoctoral research on the neural mechanisms of prosocial behaviour. Ultimately I hope to direct my own research centre and advise policy makers on human behavior.