Directory

I was born in the United States but grew up in Nigeria, where I completed a BS in microbiology. In pursuit of a better education and career, I returned to the US and did a master’s in molecular biology and biochemistry with a specialization in biotechnology from the Georgetown University, and subsequently, a master’s in clinical embryology from the University of Oxford. During my studies at Georgetown, I became inspired to start JR Biotek, a life science education company that provides quality biotechnology and life science education, training and laboratory capacity building programs to students, educators and scientists in Africa. My vision is to help build a powerful workforce that can advance scientific research and innovation in Africa, especially within the field of agriculture. I am also very passionate about developing more effective and practical solutions to food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, and this influenced my decision to study plant science. My PhD research will aim to determine the commonalities and differences during intracellular rice root colonization by both beneficial and detrimental fungi, and how these associations may be enhanced for practical agricultural applications. Rice is a major staple food in many African countries; therefore, developing rice cultivars with better adaptations to low-input rice agroecosystems is crucial for achieving food security in the continent. This is the ultimate goal of my PhD. I am deeply honored to receive the Gates Cambridge scholarship, a life changing award that would allow me to improve the lives and careers of many in Africa.

Previous Education

University of Oxford
Georgetown University

Previous Education

University of Mississippi
Pennsylvania State University

After qualifying as a lawyer in Nigeria, I studied art criticism and writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. During my MFA program, I was immersed in forms of critical and creative writing at the intersection of art and the media environment. In the past fifteen years, I have developed a diverse body of work that spans criticism, memoir, photography and fiction, including three books and a digital platform for African photography, as well as varied editorial and curatorial projects. In my writing and research, I have given the most attention to the meanings and impacts of photographs, whether they are found in archives, newspapers, or produced in the context of contemporary art. For my PhD in Digital Humanities, I will use computer vision methods to critique the dissemination of photographs during the Nigerian civil war and the ongoing Boko Haram conflict, conducting research on how those photographs have shaped global perceptions about Nigeria, and the African continent in a wider sense. As I accept the privilege to study in Cambridge as a Gates scholar, I hope, in addition, to develop a curatorial and ethical framework for the circulation of conflict photographs in an age of misinformation and AI-generated imagery.

Previous Education

School of Visual Arts Art Criticism and Writing 2015
Obafemi Awolowo University Law 2010

Jennifer Ifft is the Flinchbaugh Agricultural Policy Chair, Associate Professor, and Extension Specialist in Agricultural Policy at Kansas State University. She has an integrated research and extension program that covers policy and regulatory issues that affect the viability of U.S. and Kansas agriculture. Her current projects are in the areas of nontraditional finance, crop insurance, farmland markets and farm labor. She has published on how farm programs and regulations are capitalized into farmland values, farmland value determinants and measurement, farm labor and management, and crop insurance and farm debt. She also regularly publishes in the farm press and works with farm sector policymakers and stakeholders. Before coming to Kansas State University, she was an assistant professor at the Cornell University Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and worked in the Farm Economy Branch of the USDA Economic Research Service. She has a PhD from the University of California - Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She grew up on her family’s farm in central Illinois.

Previous Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign B.S. International Resource and Consumer Econom. 2002

Links

https://www.ageconomics.k-state.edu/directory/faculty_directory/ifft/index.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferifft

Growing up on one of the most fertile river islands in Europe, surrounded by industrial-scale farms and greenhouses, I had the chance to witness the workings of the commercial agro-food sector firsthand. It seems everyone around me was incorporated within the agricultural apparatus in some shape or form. Childhood friends grew imported seedlings in high-tech hothouses; cousins gained employment as seasonal labourers; whilst older relatives regaled stories of unified agricultural cooperatives and lamented the loss of collective farms. Hearing these stories, it soon became apparent that any account of agricultural history or theory entailed noticing material relations and affective encounters - drawing humans, machinery, crops, chemicals, and animal beings into a complex fold. This observation led me to study both plant pathology and immunology in tandem with sociology and cultural studies, granting an intimate view into scientific knowledge production. During my PhD, I hope to examine the biopolitics of historical and contemporary seed banking initiatives, with special emphasis on patent laws and ownership structures surrounding wild landrace varieties. Additionally, I am also interested in anti-capitalist, non-institutional, and insurgent forms of agroscience. I am grateful to be a part of the Gates program and its interdisciplinary community of scholars.

Previous Education

University of Sydney Environmental Sociology 2020
University of Sydney Sociology, Cultural Studies 2017
University of Sydney Faculty Scholars Program 2017

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zsuzsannaihar

Since completing my Gates Trust supported PhD in 2014 I have continued to research issues around education inequality. Currently I lead a portfolio of research evaluating interventions designed to address socio-economic gaps in school attainment and higher education access and participation. I am an associate professor at the Faculty of Education University a Cambridge. I hold a Fellowship at Hughes Hall, and am Director of Studies in Education and Fitzwilliam in Cambridge.

Links

https://fairlab.co.uk

I am a volcanologist, specialising in emissions and deposition of volcanic aerosol. Volcanoes are one of the principal natural sources of reactive gases and aerosol particles. Persistently degassing volcanoes have significant local and often regional effects on the atmosphere, terrestrial ecology, agriculture and human health. I have worked on active volcanoes in Iceland, Central America, Japan, and Antarctica.

Previous Education

United States Naval Academy Bachelor of ScienceMechanical Engineering 2019

My immediate academic interests lie in the area of speech processing, specifically the recognition of emotions in human speech and the integration of emotional attitudes into state of the art speech synthesisers. On a higher level, I am interested in ways of defining emotional intelligence, its role in human cognitive capabilities and its integration into machines that may attempt to substitute humans in various fields.

As an undergraduate studying geology, geochemistry, and archaeological sciences at MIT, my research interests span the intersections among those fields to better understand how the natural environments of the past shaped human movement and decision-making. I believe that looking to past civilization change can be a powerful means to drive climate activism today, and I aim to apply the lessons learned from my research to inform modern climate policy and industry, especially in my home state of California. As a NOAA Hollings Scholar, I explored impact-driven groundwater geochemistry in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, and as an MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium fellow, I have reconstructed late Pleistocene paleoclimate of Northeastern Mexico. At Cambridge, I will undertake a Research MPhil in Earth Sciences with Dr. David Hodell at the Godwin Lab for Paleoclimate, where I will investigate the impact of past climate on the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapán via cave sediment records. My goal is to address resolution difficulties in pairing paleoclimate and archaeological data while contributing to our understanding of human-climate-environment changes in the Yucatán peninsula, especially during times of drought and conflict.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Geosciences 2023

Since completing school education, I have had a firm intention to become a biomedical researcher who can translate research queries into practical application for the Indonesian people. My journey towards that dream is always challenging, but interesting and full of contemplation at the same time. I have gone through a set of diverse experiences at the past to finally formulate my own direction for this dream; from being a bioengineer that produced a cancer cell-specific inducer of apoptosis from a chicken anaemia virus gene to founding my own start-up company focusing on natural product utilisation for bacterial infections. Now, I am directing my future to become an immunologist that aims at ending the global issue of antibiotic resistance. To this end, I am looking forward to enhancing my skills in research by undertaking a PhD with Prof Okkenhaug & Dr Conway Morris, where I will investigate how we can manipulate the human neutrophil phosphoproteomic response to Staphylococcus aureus and identify potential non-antibiotic therapies for augmenting the host clearance of this crucial pathogen. This degree will be paramount for me to establish biomedical research environment in Indonesia and help developing Indonesian biopharmaceutical industry. Such work will be of relevance to many similar nations, and will help address the global burden of infectious diseases. In my spare time, I love spending time with my family and friends & writing my bioscience blog at iqbalmuhammad.com.

At the University of Cambridge, I studied the political economy of health. During my PhD, I studied the link between privatisation policies and increased alcohol-related mortality rates. I have worked in health and healthcare research since I completed my studies because I am passionate about health and healthcare and I believe that we can use our achievements in science and technology to improve people's health all over the world. As a Gates Cambridge alumna, I strive to make people believe they can create change and improve not only their own lives but also the lives of others.

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/darja-irdam-b76365158

Before coming to Cambridge for MPhil Development Studies, I was working as a Civil Servant in Pakistan - involved in multilateral negotiations at the WTO and part of the Trade Policy formulation team. After completing my PhD in the Political Economy of International Trade, I am now working at Pakistan's Permanent Mission to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.

I grew up in the small city of Aligarh in India and studied at Aligarh Muslim University where I became politically involved in issues of gender equality. I took up Women’s Studies as one of my subsidiary subjects. My interest in the area led me to a Master’s in Gender, Media and Culture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I then worked as Equality and Diversity Adviser at the London School of Economics and Political Science for five years while also writing about gender and race issues as a freelance journalist for The Guardian, New Statesman, Open Democracy, etc.At Cambridge, my PhD (2015-19) explored gender and class formations in urban India through an ethnography with young lower middle class women employed in services, such as, in shopping malls, cafes, call centres, and offices in Delhi. Following the PhD, I was selected for a Junior Research Fellowship (2019-22) at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where I developed a new project on gender, digital technology, and the future of work in India. In January 2022, I was appointed Lecturer in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, where I continue to work.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science (Un
Aligarh Muslim University

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/asiya-islam/17/462/106
http://twitter.com/asiyaislam

I grew up in Pretoria, South Africa but studied and worked in Johannesburg. Between 2008 and 2011 I was involved in multi-country research on democracy and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011 I read for a master’s degree in African studies. My dissertation analysed the fall of a dominant political party which had governed for twenty years. I am interested in democratisation in Africa particularly with regard to the efficacy and integrity of elections in dominant party states. My doctorate will examine the relationship between voters and political parties to understand what draws voters to political parties. The influence of government performance, ethnicity, clientelism, leadership and ideology will be considered to determine if voters are making rational choices when they vote or if they are motivated by deeper, intrinsic ties to political parties instead. I hope to write a book on elections in Africa to stimulate debate on how citizens use their right to vote.

Noah Isserman is an academic, strategist, and entrepreneur focused on the financing and future of social goods. He is Visiting Assistant Professor-elect of Business Administration and Social Work at the University of Illinois, where is founding director of two campus-wide programs: Social Innovation (socialinnovation.illinois.edu) and the iVenture Accelerator for top student startups (iventure.illinois.edu). He is also one of four Core Committee members working on the design and rollout of a new $50M Design Center for the campus.As a consultant, Noah has worked on five continents, independently and with Common Ground Consulting, with dozens of organizations and boards on strategy, process, and messaging As an entrepreneur and CEO, Noah has helped build and sell two profitable enterprises — WholeData, LLC, acquired by the Upjohn Institute, and MAStorage, Inc., — both of which deliberately generated social and commercial value. Noah marries his professional experience with broader theory in academic research and teaching. He has designed and delivered courses at the Universities of Cambridge and Illinois at the undergraduate, MBA, MSt, and MTech levels. Noah’s work and research in civil society has been funded by the US State Department and Aga Khan Foundation, among many others, and has been recognized by more than a dozen awards and fellowships. He holds degrees from Amherst College (cognitive neuroscience) and Cambridge (economic geography).

Links

https://business.illinois.edu/profile/noah-isserman
http://www.noahisserman.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isserman

I’m from Valdivia, a small city in southern Chile, and since I can remember I have been interested in history and music. For this reason, studying musicology has been a real gift in my life. I have been quite involved in conservation and heritage in Chile, restoring historic instruments and also founding and developing archives and music collections. I have written various books and papers on the way identity and music have been relevant for the development of different communities in my country. For my PhD in Cambridge I hope to write on the changes in cultural life from colonial to republican times in South America, with a special interest in the Viceroyalty of Peru and how European-style music was rethought at this time in such a different place from where it was created. Much of this music has never been heard before, being buried for centuries, so it is always very exciting to find and rediscover old scores for the first time, studying them and the musicians behind the notes.