President of World Bank leads speakers at this year’s GSS

  • February 24, 2014
President of World Bank leads speakers at this year’s GSS

The Director of the World Bank will join a range of internationally renowned speakers at this year's Global Scholars Symposium in May.

The Director of the World Bank will join a range of internationally renowned speakers on subjects ranging from the environment and sexism to HIV, space exploration and indigenous rights at this year’s Global Scholars Symposium in May.

Environmental activist David Suzuki; Tara Cullis, writer, president and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation; Erica Kochi, the co-director of UNICEF’s Innovation Unit and Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project will speak at the event at Rhodes House, Oxford from 15-18 May.

Founded in 2008 by Gates Cambridge Scholars, the Global Scholars Symposium (GSS) brings together the world’s leading scholars studying on Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, Churchill, Chevening, Clarendon, Weidenfeld, Commonwealth and Gates Cambridge scholarships in the United Kingdom.

Other speakers at the event are: HIV specialist Dr. Hannah Gay; the Flight Systems Manager on the Mars Exploration Rover Project, Richard Cook; Maori High Court Judge Justice Joseph Williams; the American Indian activist and economist Winona La Duke; Executive Director of the South Centre Martin Khor, and other world-renowned leaders. Jim Kim will be speaking via video message.

The theme of the 2014 Global Scholars Symposium is “Dare to Differ”. This year’s theme is a reflection of the fact that many of the world’s most influential people are people who were willing to challenge the status quo and act in the face of opposition and discouragement.

Across the three days of keynote speeches, panel discussions, debates, and interdisciplinary workshops, the Symposium will engage and inspire scholars to face the world’s most important global challenges.

This year’s Executive Committee consists of Katie Hammond (Commonwealth), Max Harris (Rhodes), Tracy Jennings (Clarendon), Sarah St. John (Rhodes), and Kate Williams (Commonwealth).

The Committee will work with Directors and Organising Committee members across all nine scholarships.

Katie Hammond says: “The Global Scholars Symposium is a unique opportunity for students to broaden their understanding of global challenges. Importantly, it also fosters an environment for students to think critically about how their research and careers can contribute meaningfully to solving these challenges. We are very excited for the amazing line-up of speakers we have for this year’s symposium. These speakers are world leaders whose work we feel reflects this year’s theme: “Dare to Differ”. We hope to inspire, and encourage students to think outside the box, and to really “dare to differ” in the way they think about global challenges and their possible solutions.”

The Global Scholars Symposium would not be possible without the generous support of The McCall MacBain Foundation and all the Scholarship organisations involved, including the Gates Cambridge Trust. For more information about the Global Scholars Symposium please visit www.globalscholars.co.uk.

Picture credit: Creative Commons.

Latest News

Inclusive conservation

Rohini Chaturvedi finished her PhD at a difficult time for many students – in the midst of the global economic crisis of the early 2010s. But through a combination of hard work, initiative and serendipity she has found an impressive way to extend the work she did at Cambridge to promote conservation efforts in India. […]

Research impact award for Gates Cambridge Scholar

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is one of two winners of the 2023 Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for his work on the economics of climate change earlier this month. The annual award was established through a generous donation from Professor Dame Sandra Dawson, a former Director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. Winners are chosen based […]

AI system self-organises to resemble brains of complex organisms

A team of Cambridge scientists, co-led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order […]

Scholar wins history of science & medicine essay prize

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious essay competition about the history of early science with a treatise on evidence of knowledge exchange between the Ming-Chinese and Iberian conventions in the 16th century. The essay competition was run by the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society and the Early Science and Medicine journal […]