Directory

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, I became interested in computational cognitive neuroscience and conducted independent research on memory and on cognitive control. Through my research and my courses I developed an interest in constraints in central processing capabilities. My research has focused on the computational tradeoff of learning and multitasking. At Cambridge as a student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit, I plan to investigate the effects of lesions on the capacity to allocate and sustain attention. I will research whether attentional deficits are due to overattending and thus an inability to switch attention between tasks or an inability to attend in general. This work has the potential to inform our understanding of the mechanisms of sustaining attention and the mechanisms through which we learn how best to allocate attention. My research also has implications for those with attention deficits.

Previous Education

Princeton University

Growing up in rural Maryland, I often entertained myself by capturing and raising a menagerie of local animals – minnows, spiders, newts, crayfish, rabbits, frogs, turtles, mantids, ants, birds…My love for wildlife was further enhanced as I read dozens of books by English conservationist Gerald Durrell, whose work inspired me to consider conservation as a career path. With Durrell’s bold, charismatic approach to saving rare animals as something of a guiding light, I studied Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Princeton and conducted research in wildlife conservation. Also in college, my life was transformed as – for the first time – I truly grasped God’s beautiful redemptive narrative and understood its implications for the world and my life. Now, as I pursue graduate training in conservation biology at Cambridge and beyond, I am eager to serve others by bringing both science and faith to bear on some of the most pressing and difficult conservation challenges in the world.

I am interested in how political ideas play out in past and present. As an MPhil student in the interdisciplinary program in Political Thought and Intellectual History, I hope to explore the contexts in which particular political philosophies unfolded as well as the ways in which those philosophies influenced history by empowering people to act. As an intern on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, I saw firsthand how framing ideas in new ways can lead to a more informed and engaged citizenry. I ultimately hope to use these academic and policy experiences to serve as a communicator between policymakers and citizens, using the power of narrative and my background as both a historian and creative writer to close the gap between individuals and their government.

Previous Education

Princeton University

As an undergraduate at Princeton, I am majoring in the History of Science and completed the pre-med curriculum. My research interests at Princeton revolve around the medicalization of postpartum depression, the feminist self-help movements who pushed for increased medical recognition of their experiences, and the narratives of women, across time and geography, who suffer from postpartum depression. Through an MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society at Cambridge, I intend to expand my senior thesis work on organized feminism’s advocacy for medical treatment of postpartum depression, with a focus on how social movements within England influenced the psychiatric treatment of postpartum depression.

Ultimately, I hope to attend medical school and then specialize in the treatment and care of women’s mental health, to honor each woman’s story, including, where relevant, experience with motherhood. I am excited to learn from and with the diverse scholars who comprise the Gates-Cambridge community.

I am one of seven children and attended schools in five different states growing up. I am always look for some competitive hoops; at Princeton, I serve as Captain of Women’s Club Basketball. But my favorite activity is simply to be with people, whether my teammates, the residents I guide as a Residential College Adviser, or the community at the Center for Jewish Life. I am excited to do likewise at Cambridge.

Previous Education

Princeton University Bachelor's Degree in History 2019

Previous Education

Princeton University MPA Public Policy/International Development 2004
Chulalongkorn University BA International Relations 2001

I graduated from Princeton University in 2013 with a BA in History and minors in European Cultural Studies, Latin, and Medieval Studies. After that, I spent a year in New York City reading Greek and Latin texts as a member of Columbia University's post-baccalaureate program in Classics and working on an upcoming exhibit on annotated books at the New York Society Library. My research interests lie at the intersection of scholarship, religion, and intellectual history in early modern Europe, particularly England—a time and place where decisions about history and theology could be matters of life and death. I'm interested in the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century churchmen drew on ecclesiastical history as they defended and shaped the nascent Church of England. I look forward to working further on this and related subjects at Cambridge. I am also passionate about education and advocating for the humanities and the arts.

Links

http://cambridge.academia.edu/EllaMcPherson
http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/fellows/govbody/open/?i=12386

I am a PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy working in the area of near-field cosmology. Specifically I am studying faint structures in the Milky Way halo using both observational and numerical techniques

HE professional with over fifteen years of teaching and research experience in human geography and the humanities. Additionally, nearly a decade of experience in the coordination and management of international educational programs, research agendas, and development projects with significant budget, human resource management, and logistical responsibilities.

Previous Education

Princeton University MA Latin American Literatures and Cultures 2005
Portland State University MA Francophone Literatures and Cultures 1998
Portland State University MA Catalan Literature 1998

I was born in Warsaw, but grew up in the States. In 2008, I graduated from Princeton where I majored in Operations Research and Financial Engineering.

I am a journalist in New York who writes on inequality, poverty, and social services. I'm currently a contributing writer to The California Sunday Magazine. I have also reported from Thailand, the Philippines, and Britain. At Cambridge, I studied for a master's in public policy, and previous to that, I graduated from Princeton University. My work has appeared in The California Sunday Magazine, The Guardian, The Independent, Harper’s online, and Politico, among others.

Previous Education

Princeton University Classics 2010

I pursued an MPhil in Pathology at Cambridge in Dr. Jim Ajioka’s parasitology lab. I am currently an obstetrics and gynecology resident at NYU interested in gynecologic oncology and global health.

With the generous support of the Gates Cambridge Trust, I am starting my PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science. My doctoral research concentrates on mid-twentieth-century wet brain collections and material cultures in neurosciences, psychiatry, and neurology, illustrating the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of brain-related research; the transnational context of locally produced knowledge; and the consequences of spatial arrangements of basic research, clinical practice, and industry-led studies. It aims to provide a desperately needed historical perspective for mid-twentieth-century medical collections in neuropathology, many of which have been dissolved, archived as museum collections, or re-investigated with contemporary methods in the last two decades.

Having been raised a Muslim, I have always carried in my heart a fascination with the vastness of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the richness of the lived experience of modern Muslims. After graduating from Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas, I pursued an A.B. in History at Princeton University, where my interests in the history of Islam and the practice of medicine converged in research inquiring into the history of medicine in the Muslim world. This culminated in my graduating thesis which looked at paradigms of health in the late Nation of Islam. Through my MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Cambridge, I hope to focus on how a key socio-intellectual class in diasporic Muslim communities, the ulama (traditionally educated Islamic scholars), have engaged modern biomedicine and promoted varied paradigms and practices of health within Western Muslim populations. These important yet neglected histories will contribute to the project of building critical intellectual bridges between physicians/public-health experts and Muslim leaders like the ulama, with the goal of said enterprise laying not in producing a unilateral relationship between either of these domains but a symbiotic one. **Shaffin will commence his MPhil study in 2023.

Previous Education

Princeton University History 2022

Previous Education

Princeton University Molecular Biology, Applied and Computational Mathematics 2011
University of Oxford Biochemistry 2010

All my life, I've been captivated by the wonders and conundrums of complex diseases. Why do viruses mutate in unpredictable ways? And why would a man mistake his wife for a hat? With a quantitative mind, I longed for mathematical tools I could use to investigate these captivating mysteries and found them in machine learning—dedicated to the discovery of complex computational patterns in a range of applications. At Cambridge, I will have the opportunity to contribute my machine learning background to an ongoing effort to determine the genes involved with pain. Capturing complex relationships among genes and with their environment, machine learning has the potential to discover not just single genes, but how they interact to cause observed symptoms. Ultimately, I hope to pursue an MD/PhD so that as a scientist, I might help further our understanding of complex diseases but as a physician, I might never lose sight of the real patients I’m trying to help.

For as long as I can remember I have been interested in science. In college I majored in chemistry, completing a total synthesis of the natural product ineariifolianone in the lab of Prof. Erik Sorensen for my senior thesis. While I ultimately plan to pursue a PhD and academic career in the sciences, over the last year and a half I have found myself becoming increasingly curious about the process of scientific research and thought – questions such as how we are able to know what we (claim to) know, how competing theories can be tested against each other, and the ways in which scientific research is shaped by the wider society and vice versa. This coming year I will be pursuing those interests by studying the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, technology, and medicine at Cambridge.