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My life aim is to improve humanity through scientific endeavour. At the age of 11 I met Dr Takyama an eminent HIV researcher who inspired me to develop my scientific curiosity; years later volunteering at St Vincent de Paul, I observed my small services improve lives. This motivated my desire to use scientific research to magnify my contribution and advance the welfare of humanity. I will achieve this through my two interests, science and policy; utilising medical research and implementation in public policy with industrial collaboration to maximise the benefits globally. I graduated University of Sydney Bachelor Advanced Science Arts, 1st class honours, honours roll Biochemistry, Government & International Relations. I am a finalist at the World, Asia-Pacific, Australasian Women’s and Australian University Debating Championships. Vice-President of the Politics Society and Society for Molecular Biologists.Early in my undergraduate career I began researching inhibitors of breast cancer oncogene LMO4, inhibitors are a method to understand LMO4 mediated tumour progression and possible therapeutic precursors. My PhD will elucidate the molecular mechanisms of inflammatory signal transduction in the innate immune system. This will save lives of those suffering from severe inflammatory diseases including viral haemorrhagic fevers (Ebola and Dengue) and Sepsis by providing the crucial molecular structure from which new therapeutics targeting severe inflammation can be developed.

Previous Education

University of Sydney

After 4 physics-filled years at Cambridge alongside summer research at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and Caltech, I will be conducting a PhD under Dr Alpha Lee in computational drug design. Mankind has so-far synthesized 10^8 compounds, which sounds like a lot, but it is estimated that there are at least 10^20 possible drug-like molecules. Many of these could be more affordable, effective pharmaceuticals – the challenge is in getting to them! My PhD will attempt to achieve this by describing three-dimensional molecules in a continuous representation - the continuity of the representation allows it to be used as an input to conventional machine learning techniques for the prediction of novel drug candidates with optimal properties. By lowering the cost of drug discovery, this would particularly benefit the research of neglected diseases where the profit margin for drug development is low to non-existent. In the future I hope to found a computational drug discovery start-up in my hometown, Hong Kong, focusing on diseases afflicting the Asia-Pacific region. I am incredibly honoured to join the Gates community, and I look forward to meeting and exchanging ideas with like-minded scholars!

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Natural Sciences 2019

At Cambridge, I am studying mathematics in the Part III. I hope to teach and do to research, the latter in category theory. I think that it's beautiful, drawing diagrams all night long; and invigorating, teaching all day through.

I was raised in Midland, Michigan and Hudson, Ohio an avid outdoorsperson, running, skiing, hiking, and biking my way around North America. As a triple-major undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering, Advanced Mathematics, and Statistics at Michigan State University, very little of my coursework concerned itself with climate change—yet I now see the climate crisis as the most important problem to which I can dedicate myself and my career. Having spent my academic coming-of-age studying the scientific principles of computational, mathematical, and statistical modeling, with a focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence, I now hope to leverage deep learning to advance research in earth and climate science. Simultaneously, I hope to advance research in deep learning by developing methods which address the challenges posed by modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal data. As a PhD student within the AI for the Study of Environmental Risks Centre for Doctoral Training at Cambridge and a member of the Gates Cambridge Community, I look forward to collaborating with a diverse team of bright-minded individuals towards these ends. **Andrew will commence his PhD study in 2023.

Previous Education

Michigan State University Advanced Mathematics 2022

During my Systems Engineering undergraduate studies at the United States Naval Academy, I had the opportunity to take a course in Nuclear Engineering. This course not only sparked my interest, but illuminated my undiscovered passion and fascination with nuclear energy. In pursuing a Masters in Philosophy in Nuclear Energy at Cambridge, I hope to acquire the technical expertise, policy skills, and economic knowledge necessary to lead the advancement of nuclear energy as a principal source for the energy needs of the future. The world needs abundant, clean, cheap, and safe energy, for it has implications for the preservation of our planet and also for the improvement of millions of lives. While nuclear energy is not the sole answer, it will play an integral role in meeting this global energy need. I am interested in helping to solve the social and economic obstacles associated with nuclear energy as well as overcoming the technical challenges in making safer and more efficient reactors. Following my studies at Cambridge, I will be serving in the U.S. Navy’s Submarine force and hope to use the knowledge and experience gained through post-graduate education to facilitate my development as an officer and as an agent for change around the world.

Previous Education

United States Naval Academy

As I child I grew up in a number of international contexts, most notably in Sierra Leone during the closing stages of the civil war. In these diverse settings I developed an awareness of the breadth and depth of gender-based injustice. I am completely dedicated in both my academic work and my practical activism to fighting sexism, particularly through disrupting the restrictive narratives we tell about masculinity and femininity. My main academic interests lie in the fields of theories of gender and sexuality and critical race theory. Within these areas I focus upon themes such as embodiment, spectacular politics, and the logics of hunger and desire. In this vein, my PhD in Gender Studies will examine spectacular acts of political violence committed against the self, and the narratives surrounding these acts of political self-sacrifice. I plan to focus on women who undertake such radical acts, with a specific focus on female hunger strikers. My thesis will explore the stories their ravaged bodies tell about politics, and what kinds of stories we tell about these bodies. I am particularly concerned with the powerful role discourse plays in shaping our beliefs about gender and sexuality, as evidenced in the international news media’s coverage of radical political acts. Hence, I hope that my work will challenge these dominant heteronormative discourses and find subversive, alternative readings of female political self-sacrifice.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge

As an undergraduate studying Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I researched arts and peace education and discovered the power of creativity in the classroom. I went on to work as a poet and educator, performing and teaching around the world; a journalist, focusing on peace and conflict stories; and as Executive Director of a spoken word poetry and peace education non-profit. Eventually, this work led me to begin focusing on using education to address the critical problem of men’s violence against women. Through a fusion of arts and peace education, I co-created and taught a men’s violence prevention program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for several years. In recognition of this work, I was awarded a Rotary Peace Fellowship to the University of Bradford, where I received my MA with distinction. At Cambridge, my doctoral research examined the potential benefits, challenge, and risks of arts-integrated men's violence prevention education through interviews with educators and a year-long case study of one program. I am currently working in a post-doctoral role at the London School of Economics as a researcher in the Gender, Justice and Security Hub.

Previous Education

North Carolina State University
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of Bradford

I became interested in NMR during a high school summer program, and I continued to pursue this passion through my undergraduate research. During that time, I interned at Merck Research Laboratories and Bruker BioSpin. At Cambridge, I plan to study with Dr. Kevin Brindle, who is among a select few collaborating with GE Healthcare to conduct ground-breaking MRI research. In his lab, I will utilize dynamic nuclear polarization to increase the inherent insensitivity of MR techniques.

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.

I have been a senior Life Science major at the US Military Academy.  As cadet-in-charge of the Big Brothers Big Sisters School Based Program, I was an active leader in an organization that reaches out as mentors to elementary/middle school students in the local community.  I was Operations Officer of the American Chemical Society.  West Point afforded me numerous leadership positions and military training experiences, including an internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, platoon leader during Cadet Basic Training, Drill Cadet Leadership Training at Fort Benning, and most recently Asst Battalion Operations Officer.  The MPhil at Cambridge will serve me immensely as I pursue a career in military medicine as a physician.  Throughout my career, I will strive to improve the health of soldiers who serve our county within the military, as well as all those who live within the communities in which I practice, and the world communities when called to administer humanitarian aide.

In 2013 I completed my Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Auckland. I specialised in Civil and Environmental engineering and developed a passion for environmental engineering in my final years. My work for an environmental consultancy since completing my undergraduate study has confirmed this passion and given me valuable practical engineering experience, and I am excited to contribute to the industry through research. My PhD will focus on contaminated site remediation, which is becoming an increasingly important global issue as usable land becomes a more valuable and limited resource. Biochar is engineered charcoal made from a range of materials and has a range of beneficial properties, including the ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and improve agricultural yield. My research investigates the influence of biochar on the behaviour of contaminants within soil and groundwater and the sustainability of its application compared with existing technologies. It is anticipated that this material can improve the overall sustainability of the land remediation industry by shifting the reliance from landfills to using renewable, easily accessible waste products for remediation.

I'll be starting at Cambridge after finishing my undergraduate degree at Yale in May 2011 (double majoring in physics and a combined program in ethics, politics, and economics) and then spending a year working with a biotechnology start-up. At Cambridge I'll pursue the MPhil in Micro- and Nanotechnology enterprise. I'm interested in the application of fundamental physics to the solution of problems with immediate human interest, especially in the fields of energy and medicine. After completing the MPhil I hope to continue to a PhD and to eventually pursue a career in nanotechnology development (either in academia or in the entrepreneurial sector).

Links

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

For my MA in History at Queen’s University, I worked on a research project which examined the ways in which British literary and governmental representations of political violence in Bengal sought to de-politicize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries. My PhD at Cambridge expands upon this research by examining the global scope of imperial networks of surveillance and Indian radical politics during the first half of the twentieth century. My research follows the transformation of laws of sedition into laws of 'terror' in both international and British imperial law from the beginning of the First World War until the end of the 1930s, with the intention of exploring the origins of terrorism as a legal category and a global idea.

Mike Meaney is the Head of Learning Growth at Multiverse.io, a London-based start-up building a digital apprenticeship platform to modernize pathways to high-quality jobs. He helps build the product, curriculum, and delivery models that support the growth and scale of Multiverse. He was previously a Research Lead at Facebook, where he focused on research and product development to improve tools for social mobility. Earlier in his career he served as an Innovation Fellow and Product Manager at Arizona State University, and as a middle school science teacher in the Isaac School District as a Teach for America Corps Member.

Mike holds a Ph.D. in Educational Research from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. He holds a master's degree from Arizona State University and a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University. He maintains an academic appointment with Arizona State University, where his research explores the design of inclusive learning at massive scale, and takes a transdisciplinary methodological approach blending data mining, design, and philosophy. His research has appeared in publications by the ACM Proceedings of Learning @ Scale, the Brookings Institution, and the Roosevelt Institute.

He serves on the Board of Directors of a non-profit educational technology start-up called See More Impact Labs, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Camp Catanese Foundation, a comprehensive college-preparation program for first-generation college students in Phoenix.

Previous Education

Georgetown University
Arizona State University

I was born and raised in India, and completed my Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada. It is here, at UofT, that I developed an interest in children’s cognitive development. The findings of my honours thesis prompted me to think about the role that caregivers can play in promoting children’s development. At Cambridge, I will examine how parent–child conversations at mealtimes influence children’s self-regulation. This is an important line of inquiry to pursue because self-regulation is associated with children’s short-term success as well as their long-term wellbeing. Through my research, I hope to inform low-cost family interventions to promote children’s wellbeing by exploring how a seemingly mundane family routine could have profound implications for children’s developmental outcomes. My goal is also to translate and mobilize knowledge gained through research for stakeholders in our community, such as parents and teachers.

Previous Education

University of Toronto Psychology 2019