New Gates scholar works on emergency shelter

  • November 1, 2010
New Gates scholar works on emergency shelter

Victoria Lee has been working for an NGO aiding groups providing emergency shelter.

Gates scholar Victoria Lee has just finished working for an NGO in Switzerland giving guidelines on emergency shelter following natural disasters.

Her work will feed into her PhD in Architecture, which she has just commenced, on the mismatches between how well a building can resist earthquakes and how effectively it can protect occupants from challenging climates, such as hurricanes and cold winters. “There are a lot of buildings in the world that need to resist both the long term and short term hazards, but are designed for neither purpose or only for one,” she says.

She will be tackling the research from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. “You have to look at problems from different perspectives, from an engineering, social, cultural and economic viewpoint as well as an architectural one. A lot of problems are multi-layered so it is essential that there is input from all disciplines. My skills as an architect are only as useful as the extent of understanding I have of the problem I want to solve,” she says.

Read Victoria’s case study

Latest News

What does extreme weather mean for us?

Three Gates Cambridge Scholars from China, the US and India are taking part in the third episode of the Gates Cambridge podcast, So, now what? which is out today [26th March] as part of the Cambridge Festival’s Festival of Podcasts. The episode, featuring Victoria Herrmann [2015], Songqiao Yao [2014] and Ramit Debnath [2018] and hosted […]

Gates Cambridge seeks Interim Director

About us  The Gates Cambridge mission is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others. We achieve this mission by selecting outstanding scholars from countries outside the UK and providing them with full-cost scholarships to pursue postgraduate degrees in any subject available at the University of Cambridge. Gates […]

Seeing the world through AI

Tristan Dot [2022] will be exhibiting two of his installations at this year’s Cambridge Festival. Am I Normal? and Dreamy Cops features installations that investigate notions of AI, including computer vision, surveillance, the human body and normativity. Tristan is doing a PhD in digital art history at Cambridge Digital Humanities. His exhibition takes place from […]

Gates Cambridge Annual Lecture to focus on ways out of permacrisis

This year’s Gates Cambridge Lecture will include a Nobel Laureate, a President of a Cambridge college and, for the first time, a Gates Cambridge Scholar. The Lecture, A global turning point: how to escape the permacrisis, will be given on 22nd April [5-7.30pm] at St John’s College and will feature Nobel Laureate and economist Michael […]