Directory

I have done my Bachelor’s in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Utrecht in the Netherlands, including a semester at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. I subsequently studied Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in The Netherlands. Throughout my studies, I have always been particularly fascinated by language in all its aspects and diversity. At Cambridge, I will embark on a PhD at the MRC-CBU, in which I will investigate how neuronal oscillations in auditory cortex aid listeners to perceive speech in challenging listening situations. In addition, I hope to be able to bridge gaps between different academic disciplines, and to meet people from all walks of life to jointly enjoy how much fun (and how relevant) scientific thought is, no matter the topic at hand.

“Why do people suffer?” asked a 13-year-old boy with many passports, when he travelled and saw his privilege reflected in the eyes of the world. Born to two statistics professors he was curious about anything besides academia, and so left his Australian physics degree for the adventure of technology startups in China. He wandered to monasteries in Tibet, sat for ten days of silent meditation at the edge of a South African desert, and tried to appreciate all he was born with by working as a data scientist at Airbnb, in a gleaming office just around the corner from the tents of the homeless.

Depression clouded that young man's mind. Emerging on the other side thanks to care that so few can access, he wondered, “If even I, with all my comforts, feel such pain, perhaps Buddha was right that suffering begins in the mind?”

And so I left Silicon Valley for Cambridge to contribute what I can to depression research. Neuroscience is in a golden age, powered by technologies that link brain scans, genetics, and socioeconomics to drugs, therapy, and public policy. Yet we are challenged by the brain’s complex biology, inconsistent psychiatric diagnoses, archaic and unjust healthcare systems, and the dramatic increase in mental illness especially among youth. I am grateful for this chance to offer what I can to help others also find their way from suffering to happiness.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Neuroscience 2021
National University of Singapore Physics 2013
Australian National University Physics 2013

Through my undergraduate degree in biology at the California Institute of Technology, I became fascinated by biochemistry and structural biology. These disciplines enable scientists to understand the molecular basis of cell processes and disease. At Cambridge, I will complete an MPhil in Biological Science in Dr. Lori Passmore’s group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. My MPhil project will explore the role of protein adaptors in guiding targeted deadenylation of mRNAs. This research will help define the rules governing the interactions of adaptor proteins with deadenylating complexes to regulate gene expression. Deadenylation is one strategy used by cells for restricting gene expression. If an RNA must be degraded to stop expression, its poly(A) tail is removed through deadenylation. Thus, deadenylation allows for gene expression programs to change rapidly in response to cellular cues. This project will promote advances in medicine and human health by establishing a basis for future research on new tools to manage gene expression during disease. I am pleased to be part of the Gates Cambridge program and look forward to working alongside students performing cutting-edge research to improve the human condition.

Previous Education

California Institute of Technology Biology 2024

With a background in electrical engineering and computational social sciences, I design collective intelligence approaches to provide a data-driven, complex system-level understanding of barriers to climate action in the Anthropocene, their interactions, and how these translate to leverage points for policy and behavioural interventions at scale.

Previously, I held positions at Caltech, Cambridge Computer Laboratory, International Energy Agency, Stanford University and IIT Bombay. I received PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.

Links

https://camcid.github.io
https://camcid.github.io/people.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramit-debnath-b1980a204

Having lived in a variety of countries - Belgium, Cameroon, the USA, and Kazakhstan - has given me a chance to see firsthand the diverse set of problems our global society faces. Growing up, I was motivated by broad endeavors like developing renewable energy sources to allow Cameroon to provide reliable electricity to the most remote parts of their country, lowering the cost of biomedical products so that millions in Kazakhstan have access to basic healthcare, and improving transportation in congested cities in Belgium and the USA. Starting college, I wondered whether there was a path which would allow me to contribute to all of these causes. When I was introduced to quantum computing, I realized this technology had the potential to bring drastic improvements throughout society, especially in the fields of medicine (sequencing DNA), energy (modeling photovoltaics), and transportation (enabling artificial intelligence). This is because quantum computers, using nature's strange phenomena such as "superposition" and "entanglement", could solve in minutes what would take today's best supercomputers the age of the universe to solve. At Cambridge, I aim to study how color centers in diamond can operate as qubits, the essential building blocks of quantum computers. As part of the Gates community and beyond, I hope to engage with scholars from other fields to bring together our various passions towards the common goal of providing new solutions to society's most pressing issues.

Previous Education

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Surrin is a medical doctor based at Addenbrooke's Hospital and Cancer Research UK, Cambridge Institute, with a background of undergraduate studies in Medical Physics and Bioengineering.

His research at Cambridge is translational and involves the use of MRI to image metabolism in ovarian and other cancers after the injection of tracers labelled with hyperpolarized nuclei that enhance detection by a factor of several thousand fold.

The imaging results are compared to histology and immunohistochemistry of cancerous tissue sampled by biopsy and at surgery to validate the findings of the imaging and to show that it is possible to detect cancers earlier and to non-invasively monitor the response of cancers to different treatments using hyperpolarized nuclei.

Born in California, raised in Florida, I have an undergraduate degree in history and literature from FSU. I was awarded an MA from the University of York (UK), where I studied on a Rotary Scholarship for a dissertation treating the history of counter-revolutionary thought in France. At Cambridge I wrote an MPhil thesis treating the novels and political thought of the French writer Maurice Barres. I recently completed my PhD in French History at Queen Mary, University of London. I live with my wife in York, England.

I have a wife (Laura) and three girls

As an educator and researcher, I have spent thousands of hours in classrooms across India, exploring why some research translates to meaningful change in schools and why some don’t. My doctoral study seeks to envision a rigorous and humane research architecture in education that engages with epistemological diversity and aims to transform schools from within. Specifically, I will study how knowledge that emerges from critical and self-reflexive practitioner inquiry can enter into a horizontal dialogue with dominant knowledge paradigms to enrich both research and practice in emancipatory ways. Born in the north-eastern state of Assam, I bring to my doctoral studies a decade-long experience of running a free school for a disadvantaged community in rural India. Through Flourishing Minds Foundation, a non-profit organisation I founded in 2011, I have also engaged extensively with the larger educational ecosystem - schools, government bodies, multinational agencies and NGOs - to integrate neuropsychological research with lived experience to foster learning and well-being in schools. In the future, I intend to set up a research and advocacy institute in India that facilitates interdisciplinary work between practitioners and researchers in education.

Trained as a psychologist in Madrid (Spain) and as a neuroscientist in Utrecht (The Netherlands), I'm very interested in the interface between neuropsychology and fundamental neuroscience as a way to identify the neuro-biological mechanisms underlying psychopathology. For my PhD, I am combining various neuroimaging techniques with psychopharmacology, neuropsychological testing and genetic profiling on various psychiatric patient groups, such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Previous Education

University of Cambridge PhD Music 2011
University of Cambridge MPhil Musicology 2007
University of Cardiff BA Music Studies 2005

Raised in New Jersey, I completed my B.A. in Astrophysics at Columbia University in the City of New York. As an undergraduate, I fell in love with asking the astrophysical questions that lied at the intersection of the blackboard and the computer. During my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics I will work with the Theoretical Astrophysics group to study the galactic center, focusing on characterizing the fluid and planetary dynamics that govern Super-Massive Black Hole accretion disks and the objects that are embedded within them. Developing theoretical models and computational simulations to study this physics has wide applications to research in cosmology, gravitational waves, and plasma. In addition to my research, I am passionate about democratizing science education and developing a diverse and international community of scientists. The task of pushing the frontier of knowledge and uplifting the human condition is inherently interdisciplinary, international, and difficult, but as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar I look forward to working towards strategies and solutions together with the global and multi-faceted community of fellow Gates-Cambridge scholars.

Previous Education

Columbia University Astrophysics 2023

Originally from Monterey, CA I completed my BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley after transferring from Monterey Peninsula College. Throughout my educational career, I developed my passion for research in synthetic biology, mentorship, and outreach. At Cambridge, I hope to overcome contemporary uropathogenic Escherichia coli antibiotic resistance and other bacterial resistance towards UTIs through the discovery of novel alternatives to traditional beta-lactam antibiotics. After my PhD, I hope to continue research projects that will advance global health as well as increase diversity in STEM education.

Previous Education

University of California, Berkeley Chemical Engineering 2023
Monterey Peninsula College Chemical Engineering 2021

Born in Sorocaba, Brazil, I grew up understanding that there are a set of cultural barriers for LGBT individuals within the country. Because of that, in my undergraduate studies in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Political Science at Franklin University Switzerland, topics of gender, sexuality and the nation in Latin America moved my academic enquiries. My current MPhil program in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge continues to reflect my interest for these questions, as my dissertation examines how representations of trans and queer aging women in Brazil interact with the country's nation-state paradigm through image, film and text. For my PhD dissertation, I hope to write a comparative analysis between Argentina and Brazil regarding their queer futurity discourse within LGBT assemblies. I aim at mapping the dialogical relations between queerness and liberal notions of progress and the future that took place while the countries moved toward democratic regimes in the 1980s. By doing so, I hope to explore how these notions have contributed to the configuration of the current LGBT assemblies discourse of queer futurity. With my research, I hope to strengthen the tie between theory and activism, as well as collaborate to new developments in the direction of LGBT movements from local to international levels by advancing the debate on the shapes the dialogue of queer futurity takes across cultures.

Previous Education

Franklin University Switzerlan
University of Cambridge

I was born and brought up in South India. I chose to pursue bioengineering as an undergraduate to study the human body from the perspective of a structure-function relationship defined within a mathematical framework. As part of my Masters in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, I worked on developing a polymer based gene delivery therapy for brain tumours and explored ways of making this technology available to patients. As a PhD student in Chemistry at Cambridge, I hope to work on developing biophysical tools to better understand and elucidate the protein chemistry and associated toxicity in neurodegenerative diseases. However, in many parts of the world, there is a large gap between the availability and financial accessibility of life-changing technologies. This has been partly informed by my upbringing in India and my work with non-profits developing public health interventions. As part of the Gates Cambridge community, I aspire to address this gap by working at the intersection of research and social entrepreneurialism to improve the standard of care in low and middle income countries.

Previous Education

University of California Riverside
Johns Hopkins University