Directory

My life has been characterized by travel and shifting residences, yet my home will always be East Africa where I was born. Its stunning vistas and resilient people have a 20 year hold on my wandering heart. Yet both are threatened by the deterioration of climate and the disregard we as humans have shown to the world. Graduating with a major in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Energy Engineering from Duke University, I hope to take this background and learn how to use my education to slow, stop, or replace engineering practices that are destroying the environment. During the past few years, I had the opportunity to complete several internships working in rural Burundi, where my work ranged from building design to solar installation. In addition, my studies of Energy Engineering in New Zealand sparked my interest in creating technical solutions that limit environmental impact while pushing global change. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship has given me the opportunity to continue this passion with Engineering for Sustainable Development. It is my hope that I can use the skills this program teaches me, to help the rapidly developing communities of East Africa grow in a sustainable way, with a particular focus on sources of renewable energy.

Previous Education

Duke University Minor in Energy Engineering 2019

Florence Nabwire is a Research Associate and Prince of Wales Junior Research Fellow at CISL, MRC Epidemiology Unit, and Wolfson College. Her current research focuses on strategies for sustainable improvement in maternal and child nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. Florence is a nutritionist with pre-doctoral working experience in nutrition programming in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Previous Education

University Of Nairobi MSc. Applied Human Nutrition 2011
University Of Nairobi BSc. Food Science and Technology 2008

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/florence-nabwire-ph-d-83b80313

I grew up in suburban New Jersey as the son of immigrants from southern India. My father is from a small village called Pedapulivarru, which inspires my passion for health equity in underserved communities. Community service, which was central to my life growing up, showed me how similar disparities exist in the U.S. as well. Currently, I'm a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. At Cambridge, I studied the MPhil in Epidemiology and pursued my thesis research on the Impact of India's Community Health Workers on Antenatal and Infant Health. Prior to Cambridge, I received my BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a minor in Statistics from Harvard University. At Harvard, I published research on vaccination timing in Tanzania, led a global health advocacy organization, and directed national youth campaigns for the March of Dimes, a U.S.-based non-profit focused on preventing preterm birth.

Previous Education

Harvard University

I work on anonymity, privacy and traffic analysis in networks. Specifically, I am trying to understand how topology of networks (social, political and biological ) are affected by the dynamics of conflict unfolding on top of them.

Previous Education

Bangalore University -PES Institute of Technology

I'm glad to have the opportunity to study at Cambridge. I'm going to be studying for an M.Phil in Finance at the Judge Institute. Over the next year, I hope to further improve my understanding of finance and the financial markets, meet a lot of interesting people and enjoy the entire Cambridge experience.

Maio NAGASHIMA (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, the University of Cambridge. His chief interests lie in the European intellectual milieu in which medieval Irish adaptations of classical Latin epics were produced. His doctoral research explores the manuscript tradition of In Cath Catharda, the late 12th- or early 13th-century Irish adaptation of Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and the influence of the contemporaenous Lucanian exegesis upon the production and transmission of the vernacular work. He has recently contributed a chapter to Clarke, M., et al. (eds.), Classical Antiquity and Medieval Ireland (London, Bloomsbury: 2024).

During my bachelors at the University of Texas at Dallas, I was exposed to the sheer beauty of physics and the elegance of the tools it uses to deconstruct and understand the natural world. In materials science, particularly device physics, this beauty and elegance comes together with a chance to address some of the serious engineering problems our society faces looking forward. During my PhD in Materials Science, I seek to explore electrically driven phase transitions and electrocaloric effects in ionic liquids and dipolar fluids. These materials, which are eco-friendly and scalable, may be the key to displacing current vapor compression cooling with more efficient and accessible electrical cooling technologies. With this research, I seek to address not just issues in energy scarcity and environmental sustainability, but also in global health, where accessible cooling and temperature regulation are crucial in maintaining healthy, pathogen free environments.

Malavika Nair is an Associate Professor in Biomaterials at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Malavika is a materials scientist by training, obtaining a BA, MSci in Natural Sciences (2012-2016) and a PhD (2016-2019) from the University of Cambridge. Malavika's doctoral work, funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust, was focused on the multiscale characterisation of ice, collagen, and ice-templated collagen scaffolds for tissue engineering.This was followed by post-doctoral research in 2020 combining machine learning techniques with experimental biomaterials datasets, and the award of a research fellowship at Emmanuel College where Malavika began working on electroactive biomaterials for tissue regeneration.In 2022, Malavika moved to the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering to expand the work on electroactive biomaterials for use in bio-stimulation, bio-sensing and drug delivery.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge

Links

https://eng.ox.ac.uk/people/malavika-nair

I was born in Honolulu, Hawai’i and lived there for almost all of my life before college. I then moved to the frigid northeast and spent four years at Harvard, graduating with an AB in Chemical and Physical Biology. With the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, I received an MPhil in Biological Science in the Genetics Department at Cambridge, doing research at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Ines Barroso. I then joined the MDPhD program at Harvard Medical School through the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology track, and obtained my PhD in the Harvard Systems Biology program doing research in the laboratory of David Reich on computational population genetics focused on India and the Americas. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow with Rahul Satija at New York Genome Center and Eric Nestler at Mount Sinai while also in the NYU psychiatry research track residency. Outside of academics, I spend much of my time doing community service and athletics (tennis and long-distance running), as well as Christian fellowship activities.

To showcase challenges in global education access, Greg Nance has run many of the most demanding footraces on the planet, including a 250KM ultramarathon across the Gobi Desert and a 200KM through the Malaysian jungle. He is sponsored by Brooks Running where he writes popular articles on his training, running philosophy and race reflections. In 2016 Greg was named the "12 Ambassador" to the Seattle Seahawks where his ultra running has appeared in TV commercials for Delta Air Lines. Greg is also a social entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to expanding educational opportunities through mentorship. He founded Dyad.com, an online mentorship platform that helps students earn scholarships, while a member of Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge University. PayPal named the company "Asia's Most Promising Startup” in 2015. As a Truman Scholar at UChicago, Greg co-founded Moneythink, an NGO providing inner-city teens with financial capability mentorship to boost college enrollment and success. President Obama named the organization a “Champion of Change” in 2012. In recognition of his work in global education, the Jefferson Awards for Public Service named Greg a "Globe Changer” in 2011. 

Dr. Muktha Natrajan began her research career through the University of Georgia Center for Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship in 2007 and has been growing to become an independent scientist since then. Through her commitment to her undergraduate laboratory, she was awarded national recognition by the Goldwater and Udall Scholarship Foundations, which led her to pursue a PhD program in Neuroscience and Immunology at the University of Cambridge and NIH, studying potential therapeutic targets for multiple sclerosis. She is currently pursuing her postdoc at the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center, a clinical laboratory on the forefront of vaccine development and infectious disease research. As Emory’s coordinator of the NIH Vaccine Treatment Evaluation Unit's Systems Biology Core Facility and manager of the serology laboratory, her projects span multiple postdoctoral goals. She manages research specialists on large clinical studies for a multitude of microorganisms and has been able to focus her academic endeavors on data interpretation and assay development to improve our understanding of flaviviruses, such as Zika and Dengue. These viruses are transmitted by mosquitos so affect a large portion of the global population, partly due to the lack of effective vaccines against many of them. Dr. Natrajan intends to continue her career in infectious disease research and vaccine development, focusing on understanding the immune response to emerging global diseases.

The area of my research is 'Computer Vision' - a field that is expected to expand and make great strides in near future. This has many useful applications in a variety of fields such as security and surveillence, animation for movies and games and medical imaging. Being at a leading university like Cambridge, that is at the forefront in research in my chosen field, will not only help me to expand my knowledge but also to meet and develop contacts with like minded people.

I am an Associate Professor of Education and International Development at the University of Bath. My research focuses on the expansion of mass-schooling in the Global South and its implications for social stratification and economic inequality. I am developing a theoretical and methodological framework with which to analyse the role of schooling in intergenerational, gendered social mobility in low and middle-income countries.

My research and teaching involve reconciling interdisciplinary tensions between economics, sociology and international development, between academic inquiry, policy formulations, and implementation on the ground, and between diverse methodological frameworks.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge 2012
University of Bath 2006
Quaid-i-Azam University 2002

Links

https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/arif-naveed
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arif-naveed-137650b

I developed a passion for infectious disease research whilst undertaking my BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Nairobi. Upon graduating in 2013, I did an internship at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme alongside the malaria immunology group. I later joined the US Army Medical Research Unit where I did another internship with the influenza surveillance group. In July 2015, I was offered a Commonwealth Scholarship by DFID to pursue an MSc in International Health & Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford. Consequently, I worked with the malaria vaccine research group at the Jenner Institute for my thesis project. During my MSc, I founded the STEMing Africa Initiative ( https://stemingafricainitiative.wordpress.com/ ) to advocate for the active inclusion of women in STEM by supporting talented female graduates in STEM to secure scholarships for advanced degrees at leading universities worldwide. The modest awards from the Western Union, UNESCO, the Forum for African Women Educationalists, and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) helped me to spearhead this program. I also got an opportunity to enhance my leadership skills whilst participating as a fellow in the 2018 Mandela Washington Fellowship, a flagship program started by former president Barack Obama to connect young African leaders with leaders from the United States. For my Ph.D., I applied machine learning to model the distribution and determinants of anthrax disease risk across Uganda and Kenya. My work will accelerate anthrax disease elimination by providing guidance for targeted disease prevention and surveillance.

Previous Education

University Of Nairobi
University of Oxford