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I started my PhD in 2010 after completing a specialist training in general internal medicine. In 2007 I had 3 months of intensive exposure to cutting edge research at the University of Cambridge, concentrating on the molecular genetics of insulin resistance. The project I helped to develop then, aimed to investigate the relationship between insulin and production of the fat cell hormone adiponectin, which has attracted keen interest as a marker of and potential treatment for diabetes. During my PhD I investigated a rare syndrome of human hypoglycemia and left sided overgrowth, caused by an activating mutation in a critical regulator of the insulin signalling cascade named AKT2. I am currently working towards completion of my PhD thesis, with an aim to go back to practicing clinical endocrine medicine and applying knowledge obtained during my postgraduate training in Cambridge.

I was introduced to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French pioneer of the personal essay, during the Comparative and European Literatures MPhil course at Cambridge. As an undergraduate at Brown University, I had double concentrated in Comparative Literature and Art History, and found productive intersections between the two fields of study. I therefore was drawn to the simultaneously interdisciplinary and coherent nature of Montaigne’s oeuvre. He explores a diverse range of topics, including but not limited to bodily functions, education, sexuality, religion, the classics and friendship. Nevertheless, the Essais are unified by their author’s tendency to reserve judgment and question assumptions, and by his preoccupation with the vehicle he employs to convey his ideas: words, and the palpable yet contingent force they exercise over the physical and social world. In my PhD, I plan to explore this theme in Montaigne, and its implications for diplomacy and justice. I have spent the last two years teaching high school history, and hope that underscoring the stakes of communication through instruction in the humanities will foster more civil discourse on a local and global scale. I am thrilled to join the 2018 Gates cohort.

Previous Education

Brown University
University of Cambridge

Growing up in Kyrgyzstan during the fall of the Soviet Union, I developed a strong interest in the economic issues of countries striving to lift themselves out of poverty. I decided to major in Economics and Political Science and to take advantage of the excellent classes on development and transition economies offered at my university, Wellesley College, MA, USA and while on my junior year abroad at the University of Oxford, UK. Over the course of my studies, I explored policies aimed at stimulating growth of businesses and wrote my undergraduate thesis on determinants of enterprise performance in Russia and other transition economies. At the University of Cambridge, I intend to continue my research on the role of public policy in enterprise development. Ultimately, I hope to become a professional economist and contribute to the improvement of business performance and market competitiveness in transition economies.

My interest in International Criminal Law as a field of study grew out of the internship I did at the ICTY, during my second year at the University of Bristol. I was fascinated by the discrepancies in practice of International Criminal Law and what I was being taught. I wanted to further explore this during my LLM at the LSE, where I researched how the ICTY produces a narrative about Bosnia as a gendered and ethnicized “other.” Since graduating from the LSE I have co-authored two books and co-founded the only feminist magazine in Bosnia. I am currently a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College, where I am working on a feminist critique of the legal discourse surrounding Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. At Cambridge my research will explore ICL as a site of knowledge production through the prisms of Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Scholarship and Third World Approaches to Law. This research is important because it will not merely explore how the ICTY produces knowledges about Bosnia that are ethnicized and gendered, but also at how these knowledges (and the process of their production) produce a certain truth about the wider project of International Criminal Law (ICL). I will seek to explore to what extent the very survival of ICL is contingent on the ascendance of particularly gendered and ethnicized knowledges to the status of truth. I am incredibly humbled to be the first scholar from Bosnia to be joining the Gates Cambridge Community.

Previous Education

University of Bristol
London School of Economics and Political Science