Directory

My Princeton University and Columbia University degrees weren’t the first to teach me that inequity in education opportunities and outcomes is wide-spread, yet poorly-addressed. Writing my college and scholarship essays on my smartphone and having my mother bus me to the best free advanced academic programs available outside my neighborhood taught me that. When coupled with biases in technology that scholars like Ruha Benjamin, Joy Buolamwini, and Timnit Gebru expose, the future of EdTech and its ability to widen educational divides and be complicit in anti-Black racism is concerning. This conviction will guide my Cambridge PhD research as I investigate the use of EdTech applications by out-of-school youth (OSY). In meditating on what I aim to accomplish in the realm of EdTech, I ultimately start by questioning and analyzing how we adapt technology to students’ learning needs, working alongside students to design interventions. Moreover, I will grapple with how education can be made more equitable and how research is more than a distorted reflection imagined by outsiders studying communities unfamiliar to them. Rather, it’s an interrogation of how the Western world relinquishes agency and legitimacy to these communities.

Previous Education

Saint Louis University Masters of Business Administration (MBA) 2017
San Diego State University Master of Arts, Geography 2001
San Diego State University Bachelors of Arts, Geography 1997

Links

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/jensen
http://warwick.academia.edu/EricJensen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-jensen-15756b3

Born and raised in Denmark and having lived a year in the US, I moved to England to study Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student. After a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, I developed a passion for neuroscience as a Janelia Undergraduate Scholar in the US, where I studied how fruit flies navigate. I therefore decided to pursue a PhD in neuroscience, where I will make a move to slightly larger organisms to tackle some of the mysteries of the brain in the Cambridge Department of Engineering. Working in the Computational and Biological Learning Lab alongside researchers in both machine learning and computational neuroscience and drawing on the expertise of the Cambridge neuroscience community more broadly, I aim to improve our understanding of motor learning using tools from dynamical systems theory and control theory. Improving our knowledge of the motor system will help us further understand how we interact with a complex environment, while advances in basic neuroscience can also drive advances in more applied fields, such as artificial intelligence and clinical neuroscience.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Computational Biology 2019
University of Cambridge Natural Sciences 2018

There is a Chinese proverb that states: 'When the winds of change blow, some build walls. Others build windmills.' In the wake of COVID-19, where attention was concentrated on taking stock of systemic losses and progress undone, my doctoral research explores the experiences of schools that successfully built windmills when faced with adversity. My work attempts to understand the mechanisms behind how education can move beyond the notion of resilience, i.e., withstanding and recovering from crisis, and instead learn to harness crisis as an opportunity for organisational and systemic evolution in real time. In doing so, it asks: In a world facing interconnected, unpredictable, and compounding upheavals, can we learn not just to survive crisis, but find a way to grow from it?

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MPhil Education (EGID) 2020
The University of Edinburgh MA Social Policy (with SPS) 2019

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikitajha325

Previous Education

University of Cambridge PhD (MPhil in the first instance) in English and Applied Linguistics 2009
Peking University MA English linguistics 2003

I developed a love for neuroscience while studying at Pomona College. Through various research projects, I explored several neurobiology topics during my undergraduate studies. As an HHMI EXROP Scholar, I investigated the neural circuitry of the pain pathway in the spinal cord at Harvard Medical School. During my third year as a visiting student at Oxford, I contributed to the structural discoveries of a novel synaptic formation protein complex involved in autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. In my senior thesis, I examined the role of a neuroendocrine enzyme in peripheral ganglion formation at Caltech. As an aspiring neurosurgeon-scientist, I hope to understand the mechanisms of regeneration in the brain after neural damage. While much current research focuses on neurogenesis, to functionally recover the brain after trauma and illness, remyelination is key. In my PhD, I hope to profile neural-glial communication in health and disease and understand the role of myelin using the optic nerve as a model.

Previous Education

Pomona College
University of Cambridge

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Masters Structural Engineering 2010
Massachusetts Institute of Technology BSc Civil Engineering 2006

I have always admired the incredible resilience, adaptability, and complexity of life. While studying biological engineering and electrical engineering & computer science at MIT, I started to think of nature itself as a master engineer, spending billions of years perfecting the mechanisms that have sustained life. Working at the interface of biology and electronics allows for powerful treatments that can address serious gaps in medicine. For my research in bioelectronics, I plan to develop medical technology for targeted drug delivery to the brain. This approach opens up a myriad of applications—improving treatment for brain cancers, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and neurodegenerative diseases. I look towards building networks of problem solvers as a Gates Scholar to adapt medicine around the world.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Biological Engineering 2021

I grew up in legal guardianship with my maternal aunt’s family in a small town in the northwest corner of Tennessee. Eager to learn more about the world outside my tight-knit community, I sought an interdisciplinary education during my undergraduate degree that centered on international politics, language learning, economics, and human rights. I was awarded the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study abroad in Chile and upon returning delved into education policy and began collaborating with a local literacy nonprofit and the study abroad office at my university. Upon graduation, I travelled to Galicia, Spain, as a Fulbright scholar and have worked here teaching and gaining experience in the classroom since. As a first-generation student, I know firsthand the transformative power that education has in fostering personal and professional growth. At Cambridge, my research will explore how disaggregated data can highlight structural inequities, such as resource gaps and socio-spatial segregation, and inform policy interventions that promote justice and inclusion in education systems. I am deeply honored to become a part of the Gates Cambridge community and am eager to collaborate with other young minds committed to driving global change in their respective fields.

Previous Education

Middle Tennessee State University Global Studies 2020
Middle Tennessee State University Spanish 2020

Links

http://www.linkedin.com/in/brittney-johnson731

Previous Education

North Carolina State University B.S. Mathematics 2003