Directory

I am research student in Philosophical Theology, and my research revolves around the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Schlegel, and their reactions to and appropriations of Spinoza, pantheism and a vitalist philosophy of life.

I first became interested in prosthetic heart valves during my final year studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I had at the time been working full-time for a medical device design and development company and had the great fortune of working with practicing surgeons. This sparked me to study further and complete my Masters in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. My academic interests include novel biomaterials and blood-implant fluid-structure interactions. I continue to be intrigued by the human body and the extent to which medical devices contribute to a better quality of life not only for the individual treated but also for their family and society at large. I hope that my research at Cambridge, designing and developing a growth potential paediatric prosthetic heart valve, will contribute to this field.

I finished my MPhil in Environment, Society and Development at Cambridge last year, and the following three years will see me extending my time here, pursuing a PhD. I plan to study the politics and science of the evaluation and monitoring of payments for ecosystems projects in Europe.

I grew up in Houston, Texas near the Texas Medical Center, and early shadowing experiences inspired me to consider a career in medicine. As an undergraduate at Harvard I pursued my interests in service work and chemistry research. I volunteered with Harvard Undergrads Raising Autism Awareness and began collaborations with Sesame Street, the Boston Red Sox, and the Museum of Fine Arts. In the Nocera Group, an inorganic chemistry laboratory at Harvard, I first worked on quantum spin liquids and later on catalysis. As I developed a love for transition metals, I learned that they play an outsized role in topics ranging from oxygen transport to signaling in the brain. At Cambridge I look forward to studying iron distribution in biological solar cells, which use photosynthetic bacteria to generate electricity from solar energy. This research builds on my previous experience in inorganic chemistry while preparing me for future work with in vivo and human systems. Following a MPhil at Cambridge, I plan to pursue an MD-PhD degree and use inorganic chemistry to address unsolved problems in medicine, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. I feel enormously grateful to join the Gates-Cambridge community and learn from other students whose research questions are inspired by the needs of those around them.

Previous Education

Harvard University A.B. Degree Chemistry 2019

Growing up just outside of New Orleans, the urgency of the climate change issue was instilled in me from a very young age. Interacting with some of Louisiana's first climate migrants and experiencing the effects of increased hurricanes and sea level rise pushed me to further pursue climate science. As an undergraduate studying Environmental Earth Science at Tulane University, I discovered a new lens through which the issue could be viewed and learned about the field of paleoclimatology. During my MPhil in the Physical Geography Department at the University of Cambridge, I seek to better understand the fundamental differences in global-scale warming between three interglacial periods. This research will refine scientific understanding of the forcings and feedbacks involved in global-scale warming and will be used in models that will predict the effects of anthropogenically caused climate change. I’m honored and excited to be joining the Gates Cambrdige community and begin working with my peers to tackle one of the biggest issues facing the world today.

Previous Education

Tulane University of Louisiana Environmental Earth Science 2024

Previous Education

University College London M.Sc General and Medical Microbiology 1997
Lehigh University B.S. Biology 1996
University of Miami

I graduated with a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009. Upon graduating, I worked in the Office of Technical Assistance Management at the IMF in Washington DC. I also worked on a UNHCR project on Mapping the Living Conditions of Refugees in Lebanon, before attending Yale University for a specialized Master’s degree in International and Development Economics. Following graduation in 2013, I returned to Lebanon and joined the World Bank country office as a Research Analyst in Human Development. In my three years at the World Bank, I worked on both operational and analytical projects related to the Syrian refugee situation in Lebanon. The former included projects in the fields of social protection and education aimed at mitigating the impact of the Syrian conflict on Lebanon. The latter include a multi-agency study of the "Economic and Social Impact Assessment of the Syrian Conflict on Lebanon” and the “Lebanon Systematic Country Diagnostic”. Between 2014 and 2016, I was also a part-time economics instructor at the Lebanese American University.
I am currently a second year PhD student, and my research focuses on explaining how the Lebanese government and its policies, and the international humanitarian regime govern and manage Syrian refugees and their vulnerable hosts. Another aspect of my research focuses on the type of interaction, and processes of ‘integration’ that have developed in urban settings in Lebanon, between Syrian refugees and their Lebanese hosts as a lived reality rather than an active government policy tied to permanent resettlement and citizenship. Particular focus of my research is on developing an appropriate framework that incorporates different actors in managing and experiencing the Syrian refugee situation in Lebanon, and explaining how they constantly shape and reshape each other.

Previous Education

Yale University
University of California Santa Cruz

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

The Gates Scholarship will allow me to establish a foundation in public health that I will later use in Medicine. I am pursuing a medical degree from the United States directly after the program in Cambridge. During medical school I will try to return to developing countries such as India and Nepal in order to establish public health programs. After medical school I would like to work as a surgeon who practices in both the United States and developing countries. I ultimately want to transition from a clinical practitioner into a health administrator in either the public or private sector. I hope to later work with the Gates Foundation in this regard.

Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly daunting global health crisis. As a medical student in Cleveland, Ohio, I frequently helped take care of patients with antibiotic resistant infections, encountering this challenge first-hand. The apparent complexity of this problem compelled me to approach it as a physicist, striving to reduce the complexity of evolution into fundamental mechanisms. I was inspired by the prospect of predicting, and even reversing, antibiotic resistance through rationally designed, evolutionarily-informed therapies. I am ecstatic to have the opportunity to work on a piece of this puzzle during my PhD in Physics at Cambridge. I will join Dr. Diana Fusco's group in examining how evolution acts on short- and long-range cell-to-cell interactions within bacterial biofilms through both simulations and experiments. As an aspiring physician-scientist, I am greatly motivated to carry forward this broad, interdisciplinary approach to further our understanding of microbial evolution and improve clinical strategies for prevention and treatment of antibiotic resistance.

Previous Education

Case Western Reserve University Medicine 2020
Case Western Reserve University Biophysics 2016

Born in Hungary, raised in Austria, and then resident, as a Classics student, in Berlin and in Cambridge, I consider myself multicultural and cosmopolitan in the ancient sense—with a civic duty to all places, regardless of borders. During my studies at the University of Vienna and the Humboldt University Berlin, I became increasingly interested in the literature of Late Antiquity, an age which—with its rapid globalisation, religious conflicts, and intricate identity politics—shows striking similarities to our era. My doctoral dissertation focuses on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (The Ethiopian Story), the latest ancient Greek novel, which testifies to the cultural complexities of its time: it is a story about race, concealed and unstable identities, sexual and religious purity. My thesis analyses Heliodorus’ sophisticated handling of his readers’ and characters’ states of knowledge and discusses the influence of Late Antiquity’s prominent philosophical and religious movements, such as Neoplatonism and Christianity, on his novel under epistemological aspects. Designed as a narrative puzzle, the Aethiopica offers itself to various—often ideologically charged—modes of reading and thereby celebrates Late Antique pluralism. Believing in the transforming power of humanities, I am confident that my work will shed new light on the history of pluralism and thereby promote a respectful approach to diversity, which is a particularly pressing issue of our time.

Previous Education

University of Vienna
Humboldt University
University of Cambridge

Infectious diseases remain one of the pressing concerns of humanity. I am particularly interested in working to combat them, specifically dengue. The skills I learn at Cambridge will be valuable in optimizing management of the non-profit Dengue Relief Foundation we have established for Latin America and for synthesizing technology transfer with developing world needs. As a medical clinician and scientist, my goal is to tackle these problems from both a clinical and research perspective.

Since beginning my undergraduate studies at UC San Diego, I have completely immersed myself in research and its applications. I trained across diverse labs in psychology and neuroscience in university, and after graduating, I worked at Stanford University for 3 years on a variety of projects. I investigated how brain systems and personal traits are involved in the formation of social networks, and how features of self-regulation can be used to predict positive lifestyle changes for people. I worked alongside companies in Silicon Valley to test mobile app interfaces, provide UX/UI insights, and develop immersive (and enjoyable) VR/AR user experiences.

At Cambridge, I developed new frameworks for the study of mind wandering and spontaneous thought patterns. I also used a mix of qualitative interviews and field study designs to combine insights about how people experience changes in their emotions across time - and how smart technology may predict these patterns and better adapt to user needs.

My goal is to always keep innovating to find new ways of improving people's well-being.

Previous Education

University of California,San Diego

Structural studies of molecular machines and their assembly are my primary research interest. Ever since my Bachelors thesis project at Trans-Membrane Trafficking lab at OIST (Japan), I have been amazed by the tricky membrane proteins and the complexity behind their structural studies. My Masters thesis work at the Bio-membrane Functions Lab in Nagoya University (Japan) involved the functional and structural analysis of a flagellar inner membrane protein from Vibrio alginolyticus. During my Masters, I worked closely with Imada sensei's lab at Osaka University to learn X-ray crystallography. Next, as a summer intern at the Mancini lab at STRUBI (Oxford University), I developed a desire to know more about structural dissection of pathways associated with gene regulation such as Chromatin remodelling and mRNA processing. This led me to pursue my PhD research at the Passmore lab in MRC LMB with a GATES Cambridge scholarship. During my PhD, using an integrative structural biology approach, I unraveled the structural architecture of the eukaryotic mRNA 3' end polyadenylation machinery (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.43327). I specialise in using a combination of in vitro biochemistry, cryo-EM and NMR to study the structure and dynamics of protein-RNA complexes associated with fundamental cellular processes. I am now pursuing my postdoc research at the Pyle lab, MCDB, Yale University.

Previous Education

SASTRA University
Nagoya University

Martin Davis wrote a book called "Engines of Logic" describing computers and their history. His title is accurate. But it is amazing how phenomena from video games to music engraving software emerge from, basically, physically realised arithmetic (it does, however, make the emergence of personalities from biochemistry seem more plausible). I'm interested in the philosophy of computer science. I am specifically working on mechanised logic: formalising mathematics using computers and, on the flip side, building logical models of computer systems, usually with an aim of improving their safety or security. I believe we can learn a lot about meaning by examining our use of computer systems, but there are many secrets hiding in plain sight.

Mathematics is a language that has redefined me as a person. I look forward to my study at Cambridge and hope sharpen my analytical and mathematical skills.I want to deepen my understanding of areas like algebra,analysis and probability.I am confident that Cambridge will provide me with a conducive atmosphere for my overall growth. I am optimistic that through the mathematical skills that I attain in the next two years,I can make mathematics more fun and appealing to the future generation.