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Galaxies are often admired for their elegance and beauty, but they are also quite fragile. All across the night sky we see galaxies destroying one another, and these processes occur close to home in the small dwarf galaxies which orbit around our Milky Way. Using numerical simulations, I am able to constrain the interaction histories of these galaxies as they are being ripped apart. Streams of stars and gas are spewed from these galaxies during this process, and my goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for their formation.

I bought my first chant album in the sixth grade as a first-year Latin student. While an undergraduate, my childhood fascination with chant blossomed into an intellectual passion, which now, in turn, has led to the pursuit of a Ph.D. in Music. I am particularly excited about pursuing my interests in chant at Cambridge University because Cambridge is unique in its resources for the interdisciplinary study of chant and its medieval contexts.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania MA, MS, PhD Music/Education 2005
Villanova University MA Classical Studies 2005
College of the Holy Cross BA Music 1998

Growing up in Guatemala and Germany, I have always been fascinated by the interplay of language and technology. My multicultural background led me to study a mixture of political science and economics, as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I became fascinated by the ability of machine learning to model complex cognitive phenomena. As a computer science master’s student at Stanford, I worked together with Dan Jurafsky to build deep learning models to automatically detect and remove bias in news articles. During my PhD in Computer Science, I hope to use insights from how the human brain understands language to improve machine learning and natural language processing models. By leveraging similar mechanisms used in the brain to process language, I believe it is possible to build models that require less data and computation and which can accordingly be more effectively applied to low-resource languages and domains.

My driving interest lies in stemming the spread of preventable disease through improved healthcare delivery and direct patient care. To academically prepare myself for this daunting task I am pairing an American M.D. with a Cambridge PhD in Public Health and Epidemiology, enabling me to understand both the clinical and theoretical aspects of my future work. As part of my PhD, I am working to define the burden of cardiometabolic disease in sub-Saharan Africa and explore possible associations between HIV, ART, and cardiometabolic risk factors in the region. This work took me to Blantyre, Malawi, where I lived for the first year of my PhD designing and implementing a population based cohort study in collaboration with the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust. I have since returned to Cambridge to continue analysis of my data and look towards writing up my dissertation.

Born in Canada and raised in both Vancouver, BC, and Nashville, Tennessee, I’ve seen a wide spectrum of people’s life experiences, which go on to build drastically different world views. These world views dictate societal structures, often overlooking the perspectives of the marginalized. How is this relevant to my studies? I believe that while the artificial intelligence revolution has the potential to greatly improve lives, it also presents a pressing risk: machine learning algorithms may entrench the assumptions and biases of the global elite in systems ranging from gendered job advertising to racially discriminatory loan decisions. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, my extracurricular involvement with Partners in Health Engage and Effective Altruism taught me that even the most well-intentioned plans to improve the world can fail if they aren’t empirically tested in different cultures and contexts. Thus at Cambridge, I’ll be undertaking an MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technologies, with a particular interest in the interpretability of machine learning algorithms, inverse reinforcement learning of human values, and the development of algorithms robust to many contexts. My hope is that soon, algorithms will be able to work alongside humans to make better loan decisions, text analyses, medical diagnoses, and improve lives around the world.

Previous Education

Harvard University

I did my undergraduate in Chemistry at Oxford where my undergraduate research project focused on developing new proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) techniques for measuring cardiac creatine content in order to better understand heart failure. I am currently working at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre with Dr. Chris Rodgers developing parallel transmit techniques for ultra-high field (7T) MRIs.

Previous Education

University of Oxford

My research focuses on Calcium signalling, a fundamental process that controls many cellular functions as diverse as contraction, secretion, fertilization, division, development, apoptosis, memory and learning. The Gates Trust offers me not only the funding, but also the chance to meet other highly motivated Gates scholars. I will take advantage of this opportunity to build my skills and network so that I can pursue my goals further.

My PhD research at Cambridge integrated genetic and behavioural studies to address questions related to the function and evolution of song in Neotropical birds. One aim of my research was to understand the function of avian duets, joint acoustic displays between a mated pair of birds. The second aim of my research was to explore the role of learned songs in the process of speciation. The unifying goal is to increase our understanding of the processes that generate and maintain biological diversity, particularly in tropical ecosystems. I am a member of the Yanayacu Natural History Research Group in Ecuador whose aim is to describe the natural histories of little-known tropical species in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of tropical ecology, evolutionary biology, and the diversity of organisms that share our planet.

I graduated with distinction in Chemistry from Delhi University and did my Post graduation in Environmental Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. At Cambridge, I aim to study whether environmental change was indeed the reason for the collapse of Harappan Civilization by reconstructing the paleoclimatic history of the region. My research at Cambridge should shed light on the nature of the patterns interrelating climate and civilizational activities.

From 2005 - 2007 I studied Computer Science and Engineering at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. My time in Cambridge, both my research and my experience with Gates, formed part of a trajectory which has led me back to Cambridge for a PhD. I spent the intervening ten years designing, operating, and securing safety-critical industrial control systems. These are the systems one might find controlling temperature in a home, the fuel pump in a car, a defibrillator in a hospital, power converters in a wind farm, or robotic arms in a factory. They are efficient, perform repetitive tasks with precision, and keep people safe; however, as these systems grow in complexity, reliability and security become harder to demonstrate and maintain over the course of the system’s life. My research explores the interface between a control system and its environment, which the system senses and manipulates; how that environment could be used to maliciously modify the control system’s behaviour; and how to design resilient systems which maintain their nominal behaviour in adversarial environments. I hope this work will form part of a foundation to build and maintain trust in these ubiquitous, safety-critical systems, even as they become more attractive targets for malicious activity.

I studied music at McGill University (BMus 2010, concentration piano performance) and Cambridge University (MPhil 2011; PhD 2018). I then supervised undergraduates for one year at the Cambridge Music Faculty, teaching postcolonial studies, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. My PhD thesis focused on the fundamental role of craftsmanship in the formation of gendered institutions in antiquity. My career now bridges the practical and academic. I work alongside the craftsmen and women at the Estonia Piano Factory who preserve endangered traditional skills of hand-crafting the highest quality musical instruments. I also plan to continue part-time academic research and teaching.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MPhil Ethnomus 2011
McGill University B.Mus (Hons.) 2010

I am a Roman imperial historian with wide-ranging interests in the social, cultural and legal history of Greek and Roman antiquity. My current research focuses on law and legal culture in the Roman provinces, posing broader questions about the development and impact of the Roman Empire.

Previous Education

Harvard University BA in Classics 2005

I am an ambitious, innovative leader and inquisitive scientist, who derives energy from solving problems, while contributing value to society. I have excelled at my education and research by understanding and advancing the performance of emerging photovoltaic technologies. Since graduating from PhD at EPFL, I successfully lunched two new commercial products for advances measurements of solar cells. Currently, I am working as product manager at Sensirion bringing the smart energy transition forward. In my career, I seek to combine my scientific background with entrepreneurial mindset to bridge the gap between research and innovation. Privately, I best like to spend my time actively, surrounded by nature and mountains.

Previous Education

University of London (Imperial College London) BEng Material Science and Engineering 2013

I was born in Paris and completed a BA and MPhil in History of Art at Cambridge. Alongside my academic interests, I served as president of the Cambridge Union, where my proudest achievement was the introduction of half-price memberships for students on bursaries, thus democratising access to the society. After my MPhil, I worked in London for an independent film production company. My PhD proposes to explore how Europeans depicted the peoples of the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the first explorers returned from the Pacific, its inhabitants were represented as exotic and captivating Rousseauian ‘noble savages’. However, those depictions rapidly changed as the growing European Empires strove to assume racial and cultural superiority over them. These images reveal the dramatic shift from wonder at the Pacific and its peoples to disgust and distrust, from the perception of a noble to that of an ignoble ‘savage’, and ultimately from enlightenment to colonialism. I am currently the Vivmar Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery in London.

Partner and Co-Head of Ventures at Trill Impact. Started own sustaintech company Enval while at Cambridge. Also previously a Strategy Consultant at BCG, Chief Commercial Officer at Resysta International, and Partner at cleantech venture firm WHEB Partners.

Previous Education

Stanford University B.Sc. Biological Sciences, M.Sc. Biological Sciences 1997

I developed a keen interest in researching the interlinkage between anti-racism, Afro-hair aesthetics, and ethnic entrepreneurship as an undergraduate in Political Science and Conflict Resolution at Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia). This nexus was rooted in my lived experience as a Black woman with “kinky” hair. Thanks to further engagement with Afro-hair grassroots organizations, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the resistance strategies Black women undertake through their hairstyles —an article that was published in a Colombian academic journal. This work serves as the foundation for pursuing my PhD in Latin American Studies at Cambridge. I aim to unveil the extent to which and how entrepreneurial anti-racism might be contesting and reshaping economic dynamics for Black women in the country, crafting different economic narratives and dynamics of local development. Moreover, I did my Master’s degree in Development and Governance at the Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany) as a DAAD- Helmut Schmidt scholar. My Master’s thesis examined reparation policies and cultural repertoires in Afro-Colombian communities. I have significant working experience in the civil society and corporate sectors in my homeland, Colombia.

Previous Education

Universität Duisburg-Essen Development and Governance 2022
Universidad del Valle Political Science and Conflict 2020

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karengiselt/?locale=en_US

During my undergraduate studies in Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University in Germany I became interested in machine learning and graph theory. I joined professor Henrik Walter’s lab at Charité University in Berlin, Germany, and worked with Dr. Jonathan Clayden at the Developmental Imaging and Biophysics Unit at University College London, UK. I am fascinated by a graph-theoretical approach to the study of whole-brain network organization in health and disease. Psychiatric illnesses, like mood disorders, often impede with our ability to lead independent and self-determined lives. With my research, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of such illnesses in order to develop biomarkers that allow for the effective detection, prediction and discrimination of mood disorders. At Cambridge I will be doing a PhD in Psychiatry, studying trajectories of brain network development, adolescent depressive symptoms and mood disorder. I will combine multimodal MRI metrics of network organization with machine learning tools to identify network phenotypes that are most predictive of subclinical depressive symptoms and depressive disorder.

Previous Education

University of Osnabruck