Directory

Sabrina was the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from Indonesia. Her PhD at Cambridge was a clinical trial of the implementation of mental health services in primary care clinics. She completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at University College Dublin, studying how collective leadership in healthcare influences patient outcomes. She is now leading the Metaverse research theme in Accenture's Human Sciences Studio.

Sabrina holds a BA in Psychology and Asian Studies from the University of Melbourne, and an MSc in Organisational Psychiatry and Psychology from King’s College London. Before Cambridge, Sabrina researched medical education in the National University of Singapore and spent some years as a Psychologist at the Ministry of Social and Family Development, Singapore. She’s a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

Since 2007 I have been developing an interest in and passion for public policy and governance. My undergraduate studies in law and economics in Australia, combined with my work at the Australian youth-run aid & development organisation The Oaktree Foundation, gave me many opportunities to develop these interests. After graduating I spent 15 months as a solicitor at Freehills, a leading Australian commercial law firm, before moving to The Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm that has a strong public sector practice. My hope is that studying the Cambridge MPhil International Relations with the help of the Cambridge Gates Scholarship will continue to equip me with the knowledge and capability to have a substantial impact for the public good through public policy & governance.

After growing up in San Antonio, Texas, I undertook my undergraduate studies at Princeton University, where I am completing a degree in computer science. During my studies at Princeton, I discovered computational biology, and began working under Professor Mona Singh. My independent work revolves around constructing a computational pipeline capable of leveraging cancer genomic and transcriptional data to identify metabolites closely associated with breast cancer. These cancer-associated metabolites, or "driver metabolites," could prove key for understanding the metabolic alterations that form a hallmark of cancer development. At the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, I aim to continue my exploration of cancer metabolism and cancer evolution. In particular, I would like to explore structural and network-based models for understanding metabolic pathways important to cancer. These two areas should greatly refine my pipeline, improving its ability to uncover driver metabolites. It is my hope that augmenting our understanding of cancer metabolism and driver metabolites will open up new venues for cancer drug development and treatment.

Previous Education

Princeton University

Born in India, but raised in Chicago, I have always felt caught at the crossroads of cultures. Thus, as an undergraduate studying History at Pomona College, narratives of cross-cultural interaction and diaspora in the Indian Ocean world naturally captivated me. I curated an exhibit entitled “Navigating Culture: Islam and Encounter in the Indian Ocean World” that highlighted the historical role of Islam in exchanges between Africa and Asia. My undergraduate thesis, which I will further develop during my MPhil in World History at Cambridge, is on the Siddi people, or the African diaspora in India. My research examines the Siddi’s cultural entanglements with Europeans, Marathas, and Mughals in the period immediately preceding the colonial era. I am motivated to study the Siddi because I believe that the representation of marginalized groups in history is directly linked to the worldviews that govern their welfare today. Therefore, it is my goal to locate the voices of marginalized diasporas within the historical record, and to illustrate their often crucial role in shaping global events.

Previous Education

Pomona College

Before I started my medical degrees at Monash University I lived in Donald, a tiny farming community in Australia. With this rural upbringing I have always been motivated to provide the highest level of care to sick children wherever they may call home.My career as a paediatric doctor began at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, but I made my way to Cambridge after a year working in the paediatric intensive care unit in Edinburgh, Scotland and some brief stints in rural and outback Australia. It is a privilege to help the families and children we care for in often brief but life changing moments.At Cambridge, I am working on a study called RASCALS – the ‘Rapid Assay for Sick Children with Acute Lung infection Study’ with the supervision of Dr Nazima Pathan and Prof Stephen Baker. We’re using new techniques to diagnose chest infection in critically ill children faster and researching genetic makers of antibiotic resistance so we can prevent treatment failure. Infection is one of the leading causes of death in children aged less than 5 years, so it’s exciting to try and make a difference in this area. This would not have been possible without the extensive support of Gates-Cambridge.

Previous Education

Monash University Perioperative Medicine 2018
University of Sydney Child Health 2014

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-clark-9944a469

After completing my MPhil at Cambridge, I received a PhD in history from Yale University. My dissertation, "Empire on Edge: Land, Law and Capital in Gilded Age Basra," looked at the accumulation strategies of elites in a changing legal and geopolitical context between the Ottoman, Qajar, and British Indian states. I have since returned to Cambridge for a JRF at Jesus College (2020-2023) where I am working on a project on the transnational history of concessions, and on turning my dissertation into a book manuscript.

Growing up in bucolic Connecticut, I am the girl who saved ants from being squished on the playground, the girl who sat still for hours waiting for a dragonfly to land on my nose. My fate was sealed from an early age: I am an insect lover. As an undergraduate at Pomona College, I studied the impacts of habitat fragmentation, urbanization, and fire on pollinator assemblages. In a time of intense land use change, I am interested in how targeted habitat modifications can help conserve insect diversity. For example, planting native wildflowers next to monocrop agricultural fields enhances bee habitat, increases bee abundances, and may also improve crop yields. I am passionate about igniting sustainable action through education. I am committed to mentoring the next generation to preserve insect biodiversity. With my PhD in Zoology, I hope to become a professor. In the long-term, I aspire to work with global organizations such as the United Nations to champion agricultural mitigation efforts that may be adopted worldwide, allowing pollinators and humans to more harmoniously coexist. I am honored to be selected as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, joining an extraordinary community of learners committed to promoting positive change worldwide.

Previous Education

Pomona College Biology 2022

I studied medicine at Radboud University (the Netherlands). During my studies I realised that, whilst working in medicine is both extremely rewarding and challenging, there are many patients for whom curative treatments are not available. This sparked my interest in translational research; I want to make a contribution to get science from the ‘bench to the bedside’ to improve the outcomes for patients. Therefore, I intermitted my medical degree to undertake an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Mark Toshner and Dr Chris Wallace. We investigated the link between autoimmunity and Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH); a rare but deadly cardiovascular disease. We found that a significant subset of PAH patients had a clear autoimmune signature. I was keen to further investigate this, which led me to apply for a PhD after completing my medical degree. In my PhD, I aim to identify the mechanisms mediating the link between autoimmunity and PAH as well as biomarkers associated with autoimmunity in PAH. In the future, this may result in personalised treatment and better outcomes for PAH patients. I am delighted to become a part of the community of Gates Cambridge Scholars and look forward to start in Cambridge!

Previous Education

Radboud University Nijmegen Medicine 2023
University of Cambridge Translational Biomed Research 2020
Radboud University Nijmegen Medicine 2019

“Why do people suffer?” asked a 13-year-old boy with many passports, when he travelled and saw his privilege reflected in the eyes of the world. Born to two statistics professors he was curious about anything besides academia, and so left his Australian physics degree for the adventure of technology startups in China. He wandered to monasteries in Tibet, sat for ten days of silent meditation at the edge of a South African desert, and tried to appreciate all he was born with by working as a data scientist at Airbnb, in a gleaming office just around the corner from the tents of the homeless.

Depression clouded that young man's mind. Emerging on the other side thanks to care that so few can access, he wondered, “If even I, with all my comforts, feel such pain, perhaps Buddha was right that suffering begins in the mind?”

And so I left Silicon Valley for Cambridge to contribute what I can to depression research. Neuroscience is in a golden age, powered by technologies that link brain scans, genetics, and socioeconomics to drugs, therapy, and public policy. Yet we are challenged by the brain’s complex biology, inconsistent psychiatric diagnoses, archaic and unjust healthcare systems, and the dramatic increase in mental illness especially among youth. I am grateful for this chance to offer what I can to help others also find their way from suffering to happiness.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Neuroscience 2021
National University of Singapore Physics 2013
Australian National University Physics 2013

I worked as a commercial lawyer in Sydney and as an associate (or clerk) to two Australian federal judges (one in Sydney, one in Melbourne) before coming to Cambridge. My PhD research at Cambridge was on the interception (stopping, searching and seizing) of shipping in order to regulate such activities as drug smuggling, WMD trafficking and the management of fisheries. Since leaving Cambridge I have work as a Lecturer and Reader in Law at University College London. From April 2015 I will be an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Melbourne.

Zack is Priest Vicar at Christ Church, Oxford. At the University, he is a tutorial affiliate of the Faculty of History and associate member of the Faculty of Theology & Religious Studies.

In 2023, he won the Ecclesiastical History Society's book prize for a first monograph, on research stemming from his Gates Cambridge funded PhD. He was recently appointed to the Academic Board of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lambeth Research Degrees.

Zack works primarily on collections of sermons and biblical commentaries from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in particular their place within the intellectual, spiritual, and economic cultures of the eighth through tenth centuries. His historical research has focused strongly on the central place of religious practice in the cultures of the Latin West, and the reception history of biblical texts.

His first monograph, The Homiliary of Paul the Deacon, considered a unique collection of sermons commissioned by Charlemagne, along with 88 of its earliest extant manuscripts, used in cathedrals and monasteries across the Carolingian Empire. The homiliary was a striking example of royal piety and the patronage of scholarship in the eighth and ninth centuries, with a considerable impact on later religious practice and theological writing.

His present research project concerns power and poverty in the Middle Ages, considering how the Gospel of Luke and the thought of its most important medieval interpreter, Bede, affected practices of charity, work, and ownership. He is at work on a book tentatively titled, Bede’s economy: The commentary ‘On Luke’ and its readers in early medieval West.

Links

https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/people/zachary-guiliano
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/early_manuscripts/preaching/index.cfm

My research focuses on a class of proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins. Unlike most well-studied proteins, such as those responsible for immunological responses, catalysis, and DNA replication, disordered proteins have no rigid three-dimensional structure and are instead highly dynamic. Despite their high prevalence in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes, these proteins receive little attention, likely a result of how difficult they are to observe experimentally. My doctoral research will combine experimental methods with high-powered modelling techniques to understand these proteins and their relation to disease. Originally from Chicago, I attended Pomona College, where I double majored in chemistry and mathematics. There, I studied topics ranging from protein-ligand binding to topological complexity in protein structures (such as knots and links). My love of working at the intersection of biochemistry, math, and physics led me to begin working with Professor Michele Vendruscolo at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar, where I am combining computational methods with experimental techniques to understand the interactions between disordered proteins and therapeutic drugs. I am keen to improve the ways in which biochemists obtain information about protein function and stability and am intrigued by the potential of such work to have direct implications on our understanding and treatment of disease.

Previous Education

Pomona College
University of Cambridge

I was born in the United States but grew up in Nigeria, where I completed a BS in microbiology. In pursuit of a better education and career, I returned to the US and did a master’s in molecular biology and biochemistry with a specialization in biotechnology from the Georgetown University, and subsequently, a master’s in clinical embryology from the University of Oxford. During my studies at Georgetown, I became inspired to start JR Biotek, a life science education company that provides quality biotechnology and life science education, training and laboratory capacity building programs to students, educators and scientists in Africa. My vision is to help build a powerful workforce that can advance scientific research and innovation in Africa, especially within the field of agriculture. I am also very passionate about developing more effective and practical solutions to food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, and this influenced my decision to study plant science. My PhD research will aim to determine the commonalities and differences during intracellular rice root colonization by both beneficial and detrimental fungi, and how these associations may be enhanced for practical agricultural applications. Rice is a major staple food in many African countries; therefore, developing rice cultivars with better adaptations to low-input rice agroecosystems is crucial for achieving food security in the continent. This is the ultimate goal of my PhD. I am deeply honored to receive the Gates Cambridge scholarship, a life changing award that would allow me to improve the lives and careers of many in Africa.

Previous Education

University of Oxford
Georgetown University

I developed a love for neuroscience while studying at Pomona College. Through various research projects, I explored several neurobiology topics during my undergraduate studies. As an HHMI EXROP Scholar, I investigated the neural circuitry of the pain pathway in the spinal cord at Harvard Medical School. During my third year as a visiting student at Oxford, I contributed to the structural discoveries of a novel synaptic formation protein complex involved in autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. In my senior thesis, I examined the role of a neuroendocrine enzyme in peripheral ganglion formation at Caltech. As an aspiring neurosurgeon-scientist, I hope to understand the mechanisms of regeneration in the brain after neural damage. While much current research focuses on neurogenesis, to functionally recover the brain after trauma and illness, remyelination is key. In my PhD, I hope to profile neural-glial communication in health and disease and understand the role of myelin using the optic nerve as a model.

Previous Education

Pomona College
University of Cambridge

I'm part of Arup's sustainability group in Melbourne. Since graduating from Cambridge in 2007, I have worked with developers, designers and policy makers to make sure our towns and cities are great places to live, produce their own energy, recycle water, and give people access to public transport. Some of my work that I am proud of include: advising the City of Melbourne on getting sustainability into the planning system and helping the UK construction industry reduce carbon emissions.

My research examines how multi-sensory encounters with landscapes shape people’s perceptions of heritage, belonging, and social difference. As a member of the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) Project since 2007, I have undertaken archaeological and ethnographic research on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, on topics ranging from early medieval monasticism and pilgrimage traditions, pastoralism, heritage tourism, and sustainability. Myself and colleagues have published research results in Antiquity, Medieval Archaeology, The Journal of Social Archaeology, and the Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Notre Dame, I am working with Dr. Ian Kuijt on the book project Faith Along the Water, which traces the expansion and development of monastic settlements across the seascape of Connemara c. 650-1300 CE.

Previous Education

University of Notre Dame

Anke completed her PhD at Cambridge University in 2006. She is an environmental and natural resource economist and is particularly interested in problems of optimal natural resource use and conservation under conditions of risk, uncertainty and irreversibility. She has applied her research on climate change adaptation to inform policy in the areas of optimal land use, biodiversity conservation, invasive species, salt marsh conservation and water management. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and an Associate Editor of Environmental Conservation, Cambridge University Press.

Previous Education

University of Melbourne BA Environmental Studies/Japanese, Hon Environmental Economics, B.Com. Economics 1998
University of Cambridge MPhil Environmental Policy

Links

http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/eco/staff/#academic
https://sites.google.com/a/monash.edu/anke-leroux/Home