Directory

During my undergraduate studies, I became fascinated by first statistics, and then, after an internship at a medical research institute, by the ability of statistics to contribute to fundamental research in biology. I completed a Bachelor of Science and then a Master of Science (Mathematics and Statistics) both at the University of Melbourne. In my MSc thesis, I critically compared statistical methods for selecting genes that distinguish biological cell-types in single-cell transcriptomics data. In my PhD research, I will aim to improve the statistical methodology used in genetic colocalisation analyses, with a particular focus on the ‘coloc’ software. Colocalisation analysis aims to determine whether multiple observed traits share an underlying genetic cause, with the aim of understanding how traits may mediate each other. By incorporating recent advances in our understanding of genetics into coloc’s statistical methodology, I hope to improve its performance for both fundamental genetics research and in drug discovery pipelines.It is a great honour to be joining the Gates Cambridge community, and I look forward to commencing my research at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, with the ultimate goal of improving the lives of others.

Previous Education

University of Melbourne Maths 2021
University of Melbourne Science 2019

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago majoring in Chemistry, I identified art conservation as a field that brings together may love of scientific research and knowledge of art history. The work of conservation scientists often goes unseen, but is crucial to understanding and preserving works of art and culture for future generations. At Cambridge, I will work in Dr. Stephen Elliott's lab on the application of Raman Spectroscopy to non-destructive analysis of paint pigments. The goal of this work is to further our understanding of the technical and aesthetic choices of artists as well as the effects of previous restoration work done on paintings. In the course of my work, I hope to use the Hamilton Kerr Institute of easel painting conservation at Cambridge to learn more about the art historical side of this field as well. I also plan to explore the great hiking and used bookstore scene around Cambridge.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Physical chemistry 2020
University of Chicago Chemistry 2019

The ability to determine the detailed structures of macromolecules has always amazed me. In 7th grade, I was invited to participate in Project CRYSTAL, a program that pairs middle school students with PhD candidates to solve a protein structure using X-ray crystallography. I fell in love with X-ray crystallography again as an undergraduate student at Boston University and decided to specialize in structure-based drug discovery to contribute to the advancement of medicine. Outside of the lab, I also enjoyed sharing my passion for science with my community in the Greater Boston area. My experiences tutoring math and science in jails and prisons brought me out of the academia bubble and forced me to confront the impact of my research on marginalized groups. In the United States, high drug prices often prevent people from receiving their prescribed medications. During my PhD in Biochemistry, I plan to use protein structures to design novel therapeutics that restore muscle mass in patients with muscle atrophy disorders. My ultimate goal is to start my own pharmaceutical company modeled after Distributed Bio, which was launched without venture capital and can thus set affordable drug prices while remaining profitable.

Previous Education

Boston University Biotechnology 2021

My research spans architectural and urban studies with a focus on cities in the Global South. I am particularly interested in how urban space consolidates as a site of conflict during periods of political and cultural transformation.

My PhD dissertation 'Post-Arab Spring Tunis: Materializing Revolution in the City' was supervised by Prof Wendy Pullan. The work foregrounded the city, and not the state, in understanding revolutionary trajectories. Drawing on fieldwork in Tunis, it demonstrated how political and cultural sites of power in the city become contested as revolution continues and evolves. These contestations do not constitute a break from history, but rather its problematization, as imperial and colonial urban legacies are considered in a new light.

Prior to my PhD, I worked in architecture, planning and higher education in New York, London, ‫ Palestine and Doha.

Previous Education

University of Texas Austin
University College London

After graduating from UCLA with an MA in Iranian Studies, I will be heading to Cambridge to work on Premodern Persian Literature. With my time as PhD student in Cambridge, I hope to examine the surprisingly diverse body of Persian and Arabic Medieval texts that deal with women's positions and capabilities within the field of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. I am particularly interested in female "saint"-type figures (awliya), who find some parallels in the Christian tradition. I began studying Persian informally in 2005 and formally in 2007.

Functioning memory is one of the most crucial cognitive competences that shape who we as human beings are. This sparks my general interest in (long term) memory. Specifically, I am keen to know what aspects of a situation as well as of the past and future determine what we will remember later. I also want to understand what the mechanism(s) is/are behind this. This knowledge could help to develop interventions for those with problems in that domain. I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, with a semester abroad at the University of Nebraska – Omaha, USA, and a research visit at the University of California – Davis, USA, where I started my Master’s project on the tag-and-capture theory as the mechanism behind the memory enhancing effect of post-learning stress and reward anticipation. During my PhD at Cambridge University, UK, at the MRC CBU I plan to study the effect of schema-inconsistency (e.g. evoked by objects at unexpected locations) on memory performance and how this modulatory effect might change in the course of ageing. I am interested to know what forms of memory (e.g. associative or single item memory) are modulated by schema-inconsistency and how brain regions in the medial temporal lobe and medial prefrontal cortex interact in this context.

Previous Education

Ruhr-University Bochum

Links

https://jaquent.me

Dr Francisco-José Quintana is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He also serves as Associate Editor at the European Journal of International Law. Francisco is a legal scholar interested in the politics, history, and theory of international law and global governance. His current research studies the potential of employing regional frameworks as leverage for international legal change in the interests of the Global South. This project builds on his doctoral research on the history of human rights in Latin American international legal thought, which he is developing into a book.

Francisco’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in multiple edited volumes and journals including the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, and the Journal of the History of International Law. He has recently co-edited the special issue ‘Bogotá at 75’, forthcoming in the Journal of the History of International Law (2024).

Francisco holds a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge (approved without corrections), an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (where he obtained two Dean’s Scholar prizes), an LLM in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (with distinction), and a Degree in Law (Abogacía) from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). He was previously a Research Associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a fixed-term Lecturer at UTDT, and has also taught at other universities including Cambridge. Francisco has been a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Chevening Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and a De Fortabat Fellow.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science
Harvard University

I work in the domain of smart phone based sensing systems. Modern mobile phones are equipped with many sensors like accelerometer, camera, GPS, microphone etc. and they can be used to capture various details about users automatically like accelerometer can be used to infer activity, Bluetooth to detect colocation, GPS to infer location, microphone to infer speech/noise. Mobile phone based sensing systems find applications in many domains such as social psychology, health care, and navigation systems. However, since mobile phones are battery-powered, continuous sensing from the sensors leads to faster depletion of the phone battery. My research is on energy efficiency of the smart phone based sensing systems.

p bio

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MSc Natural Science, BS Natural Science 2002

Links

http://them
http://me

After growing up in the small town of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, I am now graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. During my undergraduate career I became increasingly interested in the problem of antibiotic resistance, leading to my current undergraduate research on novel antibiotics for the treatment of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This experience inspired me to pursue research in the field of structural biology which focuses on determining the molecular structures that underlie the living world. I am fascinated by the powerful techniques of this field and how they can be used to understand fundamental biological processes. I hope to one day use the knowledge and skills that I learn at Cambridge to answer important questions about the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. It is an honor to receive this scholarship and to have the opportunity to become part of the Cambridge community. I could not have done so without the help and support from my family, friends, peers, and professors along the way.

Previous Education

Pennsylvania State University

I have grown up in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi but spent most of my childhood moving around to different cities and countries. These experiences heightened my awareness of how identity markers shift in salience and function in different socio-cultural contexts. I explored these issues with a broad liberal arts bachelor’s degree at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and then received the Fulbright Master’s scholarship to pursue further studies in psychology at Columbia University. I continued exploring the interplay of culture, identity and intergroup relations by researching about these topics in my courses; by becoming a resident of International House; and by interning at the UN with the American Psychological Association. Over the last three years, I have been teaching undergraduates in Lahore at Forman Christian College (A Chartered University) and LUMS. I’ve taught, researched, presented on, and discussed with students and colleagues the complex interaction of Pakistani identities and intergroup conflict. I am honoured and excited by this opportunity provided by the prestigious Gates scholarship to research how our identities interact with interpersonal and socio-political events and conflicts. At Cambridge, I will pursue my M.Phil. in social anthropology. Thereafter, I plan to continue to work for a doctorate. My major motivation is to use my knowledge to promote identity processes that reduce inter-group bias and conflict.

Previous Education

Lahore University of Management Sciences
Columbia University Teachers College

Though I was born in Bangladesh, my family moved to Canada when I was three years old. I grew up using stories to puzzle out my place in the world. My love of classics began in my high school Latin class, and in completing my BA in Classics and History at McGill, I gained greater critical perspectives and practical skills. I took part in an archaeological dig in Southern Italy, and adapted and directed a play from Ancient Greek into English. I learned that studying the ancient world could be done in an outward facing way and learned to share these stories with a wider community. I also worked with youth engagement in politics confronting the barriers to democratic participation for young people. To find solutions, I turned to the ancient world and became interested in the lives of adolescents in a world where their roles in society were much less clearly defined, and yet parallel to our own in their liminality. In classics, I seek to understand the voices that have gone unheard for too long- youth, women, the working classes. All these intersecting identities have deep ties to my own story. I believe that better understanding the ancient world might give us the critical vocabulary to solve problems in our modern age as well.

Previous Education

McGill University Classics 2020

With a background in Socio-Economics and Gender Studies, I began my career with a firm commitment to challenging the dominance of neoclassical mainstream economics in Vienna and London. With my most recent role at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose having been embedded in the context of Western European climate politics, I observed how dominant economic imaginaries are often positioned as objective common sense, excluding alternative viewpoints. Decolonial perspectives, in particular, remain significantly underrepresented and subordinated to national economic interests. During my Politics and International Studies PhD, I seek to investigate the barriers to a more pluralist engagement with the economics of climate change in Western European electoral politics. I intend to explore which economic imaginaries become side-lined and how this exclusion occurs. By focusing on decolonial economics, I hope to contribute to the decolonisation of national political economies, without which the green transition in Western Europe risks perpetuating inequalities at the expense of Global South countries.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science (Un Gender (Sexuality) 2021
Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien (Vienna Univ of Ec & B Economics and Socio-Economics 2020

Originally from Lexington, MA, I completed my BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford in 2007. I am doing a PhD in Biological Anthropology with Dr Toomas Kivisild. My work involves investigating the distribution of type 2 diabetes and obesity associated genetic loci among ethnic groups within India.

Towfique Raj, Ph.D., is a core faculty member in the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Genetics and Genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Raj is a Co-Director of Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Genomics Core Dr. Raj received his Ph.D. in genetics from Cambridge University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Raj was an instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Raj received the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Service Award and the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer's Disease Award.

His research group uses powerful computational and experimental tools for genetic research and interdisciplinary approaches to understand the genetic factors driving neurodegenerative diseases with the ultimate goal of finding a cure. More recently, Dr. Raj's group is interested in linking genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease to detectable changes in innate immune cells that may contribute to disease progression. A major direction of his laboratory has been to understand the role of peripheral immune cells in neurodegenerative disease pathogenesis (see the MyND study). His group is leading efforts to set up human cohorts for deep multi-omics profiling of immune cells. His long-term interest is to translate findings from these studies to potentially identify novel immune therapeutic targets and biomarkers.

Links

https://rajlab.org
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21115973