Directory

I was born in the second largest city located in a desert after Cairo, towards the end of a never-ending dictatorship. Growing up in Lima, I soon learned that Peru was a country which amalgamated many conflicting realities that were not easily reconciled. My drive to address some of these issues and think laterally has been the stimulus for my work as a researcher, journalist, editor and academic consultant. From a young age, my reluctance to yield to well-demarcated routes has broadened my perspectives and motivated me to find my own path while collaborating with others to create change. Covering dictatorship novels, autobiographical writing and the role of emotions in fiction, my three theses have contributed to advance knowledge at the intersection of literature and sociology. At Cambridge, my PhD project will explore how a group of South American authors grappled with pain and dissatisfaction in their artistic and extraliterary experiences through the diary form. By so doing, I hope to shed light on the value of a sentimental approach to adversity in life-writing, as well as the configurations of masculinity that emanate from it. I am deeply indebted to the Gates Cambridge Trust for giving me this unparalleled opportunity.

Previous Education

Universitat de Barcelona Advanced Literary Studies 2022
McGill University Sociology and Hispanic Studies 2020

Previous Education

Universidad de San Marcos Archaeology 2022
Universidad de San Marcos Archaeology 2014
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos Archaeology 2007

Over the past few years I have worked with and founded educational institutions that provide students with opportunities to engage in hands-on democratic self-governance. As one deeply concerned about the decline of civic participation in developed democracies, these experiences have changed the way I think about political life and the way we prepare young people to take leadership in it. I am passionate about creating new ways to make civic education less rote and more experiential, and I am excited to explore possibilities for this innovation through the MPhil in Politics, Development, and Democratic Education at Cambridge. I hope to draw on this education in my future career: helping schools structurally integrate democratic practices into their administration and pedagogy, creating programs that give young people meaningful governance experience, and empowering students for lives of active civic engagement in their communities and world.

My passion for the biological world began early in my teenhood. At the University of Sao Paulo (USP), I was enrolled at the interdisciplinary Molecular Sciences BSc Course where I studied the natural and formal sciences within an academically diverse community of undergraduates. I became interested in energy metabolism and the free energy transduction through the mitochondrial respiratory chain by means of the aerobic consumption of nutrients. This mechanism for life to remain out of thermodynamic equilibrium has become my greatest passion. While at USP, I conducted my undergraduate research on two mitochondrial proteins of unknown function in yeast and became part of the USP team for the iGEM competition. Additionally, I promoted university life during two Career Fairs, worked alongside the MIT-Brazil programme in the outreach project “Polymers Of Soccer” and became a teaching assistant for biochemistry. During my PhD in Medical Sciences at the Mitochondrial Biology Unit, I seek to study at the molecular level how the respiratory complex I couples the electron transfer from NADH to ubiquinone with proton pumping across the membrane, generating an electrochemical gradient that powers life.

Previous Education

University of São Paulo Bachelor's Degree in Molecular Sciences 2021

Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the editors of The Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (Cambridge UP, 2021) and co-editor with Nicholas Seager of Defoe’s Roxana for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford UP, 2022). His monograph A Spy Amongst Us: Defoe’s Secret Service and the Campaign to End Scottish Independence is forthcoming with Yale University Press.

Links

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/843332-marc-mierowsky

I am a Czech astronomy student from Prague, currently completing my MSc thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. I will pursue a PhD at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, supervised by Professor Cathie Clarke.My research focuses on the formation of planets in protoplanetary discs. In my BSc thesis, written under the supervision of Dr. Miroslav Brož at Charles University in Prague, I modelled the radiative transfer in the protoplanetary disc DoAr 44 based on observations from VLTI/GRAVITY, ALMA and various other instruments.In my MSc research, I am trying to model the kinematics of gas in the planet forming disc Elias 2-27, which is an interesting challenge due to the interplay of infall, gravitational instability, azimuthal asymmetry and orbital eccentricity in this system.During my PhD, supported by the Gates-Cambridge scholarship, I will investigate the relationship of infall, gravitational instability and planet formation using hydrodynamical simulations and radio-interferometric observations. Alongside my research, I am an organizer of the Czech Astronomy Olympiad and am committed to building a stronger astronomical community in Czechia. I am excited to join the Gates-Cambridge community!

Previous Education

University of Heidelberg Physics 2026
Charles University Physics 2024