Directory

Sanjana is an Advocacy Director at (ISC)2, the world’s largest education and membership association for cybersecurity practitioners. Sanjana has lived and worked in India, Belgium, U.S. and the U.K. Creating relevant and engaging education products and services for different age groups, sectors and geographies has been a through line in her career. She has designed and led large professional development events, formed partnerships across academia-industry-government ecosystem, built and grown teams, set vision for new products, and established go-to-market strategies. As a Gates Scholar, Sanjana completed an MPhil and a PhD in Education. Sanjana is a life-long learner. In 2020, she completed an Executive MBA from Cranfield University. More recently, she has been exploring the lives and works of different philosophers as part of an online philosophy school.

Previous Education

Bangalore University MSc Psychology 2000
Mount Carmel College, Bangalore BA Psychology, Economics & Sociol. 1998

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjana-mehta

My name is Katia Mehu and I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I leave behind a career in appellate prosecution in the United States (Phoenix, Arizona), to pursue a LL.M. at the University of Cambridge. I am committed to upholding the principles of human dignity, equality, and equity at the global level and believe that promoting the rule of law at the national and international levels provides one mechanism to achieving those ideals. Academically, I will be pursuing a specialisation in international law at the Faculty of Law. My post-graduate programme will encompass coursework in international criminal law, international human rights law, law of armed conflicts, and international environmental law. I will obtain theoretical knowledge of legal principles unique to public international law, encompassing its core values, concepts, practices, and terminology. Once I complete my studies, I hope to pursue a career in the field of public international law.

Born in Brooklyn, New York and currently residing in New Jersey, I obtained my B.S. in physics at Rutgers University. Propelled by my desire to search for the fundamental truths in the physical reality that we live in, I chose to partake in experimental high energy research. This field is extremely exciting to me because with the completion of the Standard Model in 2012, it is believed that the next discovery will significantly push the boundaries of what we know and enlighten us to what truly are the most fundamental particles of this universe. Having worked with data from the Large Hadron Collider on searching for evidence of supersymmetry for 3 years, I also worked on future collider experiments with fellow physicists at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratories. Currently, I am residing in Geneva, Switzerland in anticipation for the results of run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider, which began in June of 2014.

I first became interested in the intersection between social and environmental justice while working as an AmeriCorps volunteer for the Ocean State Environmental Education Collaborative. At AmeriCorps, I was responsible for teaching environmental science to youth in hospitals, assisted living facilities, and after school programs. My experience working with underserved groups taught me the importance of community-based conservation and inspired me to study environmental science at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Today, I lead outreach initiatives that help protect human rights and endangered species on a global level. I am particularly passionate about ensuring the health and safety of indigenous communities while working with others to end the illegal wildlife trade. I am excited to join the University of Cambridge Masters in Conservation Leadership program because it is the only academic course in the world that offers an interdisciplinary focus on biology while teaching management skills that are essential for the next generation of conservation leaders. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, I look forward to working with others to protect people and wildlife throughout the world.

Previous Education

The Evergreen State College Environmental Science 2013
South Puget Sound College General Studies 2011

A recent graduate in Political Science and Comparative Human Development, along with a minor in Creative Writing, I am deeply committed to improving education in my native Pakistan. Specifically, the goal is curbing Muslim extremism, and empowering young people with their native identity and values. Since I was thirteen, I have been involved with progressive Islamic schooling. A new type of schooling, it aims to combine secular education with Islamic values to develop ‘well-rounded’ Muslims that abstain from militant extremism. The MPhil in Educational Leadership and School Improvement program at Cambridge, followed by an M.Ed. from Harvard University, will instruct me in various leadership techniques and how they may be adapted to progressive Islamic schools. With this training, I will work at a secondary school and the government in Pakistan. The Gates-Cambridge Scholarship is a lifelong gift, and I hope that I will be able to collaborate with this community wherever I go.

Originally from LA, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in American History and Literature. My longstanding passion has been traveling and China in particular. I had an intense fascination with China since I was little, and I began studying Mandarin in ninth grade. I spent my freshman summer at Harvard’s Beijing Academy, and the following summer I worked for NBC as a guide and translator at the Olympics. Last summer I researched climate change at the United Nations World Food Programme in Uganda, and it was then that I decided to pursue the MPhil in Development Studies.

Responsible for Medical Strategy for Pomalyst/ Imnovid at Celgene
Previously Strategy Consultant @ IMSConsulting & OC&C Strategy Consultants

As an undergraduate studying International Relations and Middle East Studies at Brown University, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the lives of Sri Lankan migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. I learned that my interlocutors did not consider themselves marginalized subjects. Instead, they articulated their experiences as empowered women using Buddhist practices to navigate their everyday lives. Growing up in Sri Lanka during the Civil War, I witnessed similar discrepancies between the way local populations viewed themselves and the assumptions human rights organisations made when proposing policy. Through these experiences, I came to value anthropology’s emphasis on localised ways of life as a tool for improving policy initiatives. At Cambridge, I will investigate how human rights organisations with deeply secular roots can work to protect migrant domestic workers whose primary motivations are non-secular. I seek to confront the liberal assumptions of feminist and labor theorists engaging with the lives of migrant domestic workers and to explore the imbrication of religious embodiment in post-colonial subject formation. Ultimately, I hope to amplify the voices of women caught between the difficult experiences of migration and the problems of representation in secular human rights discourse. I am excited to work with the Gates and Cambridge communities to develop a deeper public consciousness about the role of religion as a mode of empowerment.

Previous Education

Brown University

Previous Education

Universita' La Sapienza, Rome Laurea Chemistry 2000

I was born in Germany and spent my first years in Cologne. At age ten, I moved, with my family, to the mountainous Pacific Northwest. From my childhood through my early 20s, I worked as a professional actor. I eventually matriculated at The University of Oregon’s Clark Honors College, graduating with a BA in German Literature and a minor in Theatre Arts. In college, I co-founded Averto, a real-time, crowd-sourced data mapping app, which seeks to help people navigate their environment safely. These seemingly disparate experiences kindled a fascination with the performance principles and architectures of online environments, especially how virtual and augmented reality disturb the seeming solidity of civic institutions and commercial online “worlds.” Emergent technologies have the potential for good, but there is great risk that negative consequences, such as discriminatory systems of surveillance, will be amplified in cross-reality environments. As I work on my PhD in German, I will create critical room for a turn to a phenomenological understanding of virtual and augmented spaces. I’m proud to be joining the Gates Cambridge community, comprised of scholars that embrace their role to provide alternative imaginaries of the future.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge ELAC 2022
University of Oregon Ger. Lit & Culture and Theatre 2020
Goethe Universität Frankfurt Guest Student in Dramaturgy 2018

I am currently a doctoral student in MIT's program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. For more details, please see my department webpage: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/jmenzel.html.

Previous Education

Yale University

As the oldest son of seven children, I learned to read and immediately started reading to others. I have always loved sharing stories with my friends and family, and I want to spend my life bringing people together through literature. I have been blessed to spend four years at Harvard as an English major, studying communities united by storytelling, particularly in Wales and Ireland. At Cambridge, I will pursue a MPhil in 18th Century and Romantic Studies with a focus on children’s literature and education. Specifically, I will investigate the curious case of Mother Goose, whose imaginary voice illustrates modern concepts of authorship, fiction, and identity at the axis of national and childhood communities. I plan to take my Cambridge experience into the classroom as a middle school English teacher. Ultimately, I hope to become an education policymaker and build learning communities wherever I go. I am so grateful to receive the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and I am excited to join this organization!

Interests: Romantic poetry, baking, gardening, musicals, running, saxophone, Celtic folklore, classic films, all novels (especially by Charles Dickens or Terry Pratchett), and murder mysteries!

Previous Education

Harvard University

I grew up in Santa Cruz, Bolivia and went to Universidad Autonoma Gabriel Rene Moreno where I received a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry. During my time as an undergrad student, I developed an interest in improving the health system of my country by performing research in those diseases that mostly affect Bolivia. The following year, I became part of a training program in charge of Professor Robert H. Gilman from the Johns Hopkins University, who gave me the opportunity of doing a master degree in Epidemiological research at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia where I studied the development of the most important chronic manifestation of Chagas disease (cardiomyopathy). During my training, I also completed courses in Argentina, Chile, Peru and the United States, which later allowed me to present my work at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH). I was also awarded a fellowship in research at the Johns Hopkins University. At Cambridge, I will perform a PhD in Biochemistry studying the interaction of Toxoplasma gondii with the host cell under the supervision of Professor Ross Waller. Besides my academic work, I am interested in youth development for which I have been selected as a Bolivian Youth Ambassador, a program sponsored by the Department of State of the United States

Previous Education

Universidad Peruana Cayetano H Epidemiology and Research 2019
Universidad A Gabriel Rene M. Biochemistry 2017

I am interested in the urgency and usefulness of "island cinema" as an aesthetic and political category that can be applied to readings of Southeast Asian films, focusing on works by independent filmmakers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. By privileging "island" as a critical category, I want to investigate how this more eco- and geo-conscious approach can expand academic discourse on Southeast Asian films as they pertain to decoloniality, marginalities and the non-human. I've worked as a film journalist and critic, with work published in Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, The Telegraph, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound, Forbes.com and NME. I am a member of FIPRESCI and was a Golden Globes voter from 2022-2024. I've worked as a programmer for the Singapore International Film Festival and served on the critics’ jury at the Venice Film Festival 2022. Outside of film, I am passionate about sports and have been part of Singapore's national cricket and football teams. In 2023, I represented Singapore in cricket at the Southeast Asian Games held in Cambodia.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies and English 2020

Growing up in eastern Kentucky, in the heart of the Appalachian region of the United States, I was fascinated by questions of meaning in life and devastated by the hardship I witnessed at home and abroad. Through opportunities like Kentucky’s Governor’s Scholars Program and the Brown Fellows Program at Centre College, I experienced the transformative power of education, mentorship, and community and further explored these themes of meaning and inequity. I am now pursuing similar questions through PhD research on resilience: Given similar histories of adversity, why do some children do better than others? Learning from these children may help us better support those who are struggling. I look forward to working with the Gates Cambridge community as we explore fundamental life questions and help others thrive.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Master of Philosophy Epidemiology 2015
Centre College Bachelor of Science Behavioral Neuroscience 2014

Links

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-tyJuPAAAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmetcalf

I am studying for an MPhil degree in Polar Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute. I have always loved space, and plan to spend my career looking for life on Mars. I even hope to be an astronaut someday and to conduct fieldwork on Mars.

My PhD explores the ability of poetry to act as a voice of radical political critique in post-Apartheid South Africa. I focus on experimental and avant-garde poetry with a view towards tackling the complex relationship between poetic form and socioeconomic power. My study is particularly pressing given that the poets I have chosen to highlight are largely overlooked by the commercial publishing industry and mainstream academia. While my project pays specific attention to post-Apartheid South Africa, I ultimately see my research as relevant to other postcolonial and developing milieus in which the formal battles of artists and writers can constitute a resonant mode of protest against an unequal world system. Apart from my doctoral work, I am organising Cambridge's Postcolonial Seminar Series in 2014/ 2015 and welcome all to come along.