Directory

I was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica where I navigated two cultures of care. This foundational experience, coupled with the knowledge and understanding gained from research and personal healthcare challenges, has shaped my passion for cultivating high-quality healthcare in the Caribbean. As an undergraduate studying Anthropology and Global Health at Princeton University, I developed an appetite for understanding the health narratives of people and contexts of diseases. During my MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society, I plan to conduct research on maternal health, violence and humanized birthing practices in low resource contexts. I will explore the effects of obstetric violence on maternal and child health and prioritize quality of care for women during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. I believe that it is essential to center the voices of women in an effort to reimagine birthing possibilities and will take a multidisciplinary approach to my work. I am honored to be joining the Gates Cambridge community and look forward to approaching global health as a collective effort. 

Previous Education

Princeton University Medical Anthropology 2023

A love of the outdoors, especially mountainous regions, combined with an intense curiosity about how such landscapes and their constituent rocks form, made geology an obvious career choice. During my time at Cambridge I will work on reconstructing, via mineral assemblage modeling, the metamorphic history of a continental crust terrain in the western Alps, as it was subducted into the mantle and subsequently returned to the Earth's surface. Aspiring to an academic career, I hope that through research, I am able to advance our knowledge of large-scale Earth processes - still so poorly understood.

As an undergraduate, I majored in Biochemistry and wrote my thesis in the Department of Pathology at the University of Vermont. There, the interdisciplinary curriculum of the Honors College helped to channel my interests in medicine that lay outside of the biomedical sciences. In becoming involved with health access initiatives, I gained an appreciation for how social science disciplines can inform healthcare policy and practice. History, anthropology, philosophy and sociology all have an amazing intellectual power to describe and contextualize issues in health and medicine, but there is often a decades-long lapse between what is written about and what is practiced. In order to address the social injustices and inequalities that persist in our current healthcare system, I believe the everyday practice of medicine must be directly informed by rigorous engagement with social science research. During my MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society, I hope to both develop a professional competency with the conversations in this field and work to translate this expertise into my future medical practice. And, through continuous advocacy, I seek to integrate these developments into healthcare systems.

Previous Education

University of Vermont

Women in Mexico and across the border in the U.S raised me. From a very young age I saw how gender inequality both limited their lives and increased their susceptibility to violence. Thus, the eradication of gender stratification is the focus of my research and the driving force behind my activism with women and girls. At Swarthmore College I studied Sociology & Anthropology and completed two research projects trying to understand the inconspicuous ways in which gender inequality persists and adapts. After graduation, I listened to and documented women’s stories of survival and collaborated with female-led grassroots movements in nine countries as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. Women’s stories of resilience and hope affirmed my commitment to produce knowledge that centers the experiences of women of color, and to support efforts that intervene in the normalization of violence against women. My research at Cambridge will explore the creation of corporeal responses to violence and collective resistance with other women from the perspective of indigenous women in Guatemala. As an aspiring feminist scholar in the social sciences, my studies will prepare me to engage rigorously with the challenges posed by gender inequality, and further, expand my analysis and vision so that my work may expose and create alternative worlds and possibilities for everyone, especially women.

Previous Education

Swarthmore College

My passion for chemical engineering has led me to the interdisciplinary field of drug delivery and nano-based medicines. While completing a B.S. in Chemical-Biological Engineering at MIT, I had the incredible opportunity to research a variety of chemical engineering applications, including enzyme engineering, biomaterials, and nanotherapeutics. These experiences, and my internships in industry, have given me a holistic view of the field and sparked my curiosity to address it further. At Cambridge, for my PhD Chemical Engineering, I pursued a project that combined novel technologies in engineering, biotech, materials science, and biopharmaceuticals, to address the existent global problem of treating debilitating diseases with a more effective drug delivery using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs). The relationships, knowledge, and technical skillset I gained at Cambridge, through the opportunity from the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, have been influential in building my career as a nanomedical researcher and driver of the commercialisation of new therapies.

I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, synthesizing 3D nanoscale architectures called spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) to provide kinetic control and delivery of vaccine components (stimulant and target molecules) as a potent immunotherapy. I applied this system to various diseases (including cancer and infectious disease) to analyze efficacy in helping develop immunity.

Now, as a professor at Boston University, I lead a research group working to use nanomaterials design to improve the efficacy of immunotherapies through programmed immune activity.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology B.S. Chemical-Biological Engineering 2014

Growing up in a family that struggled to afford the costs of managing chronic health issues, I realised that poor health and other difficult life experiences often are intertwined. At Pomona College, I studied biochemistry and began to wonder about the biochemical underpinnings of the social determinants of health, which drive global health disparities. My passion for biochemistry grew over four years in the Sazinsky lab, where I discovered the structure of an enzyme that could make better nutrition available to many more people. In other work with Dr. Calderón-Villarreal of COLEF in Tijuana, Mexico, I combined chemical and anthropological approaches to reveal the socio-environmental determinants of poor health in a population experiencing homelessness. As a PhD student in the Reik and Balasubramanian labs, I focus on the molecular processes that control which genes are turned on (or off) to regulate development because adverse life circumstances (e.g., poverty, poor nutrition, and violence) often dysregulate these very processes to cause chronic disease. I am honoured to join the Gates Cambridge community of scholars in their efforts to bend the arc of academic research toward social justice.

Previous Education

Pomona College Chemistry 2020

Professor Yvonne Tew has expertise in constitutional law, globally and in the U.S., and law and religion in global perspective. She is a Professor of Law and Anne Fleming Research Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., as well as the Faculty Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. She is the author of Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her scholarship has been published in the American Journal of Comparative Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Cambridge Law Journal, and Washington International Law Journal, amongst others, as well as in book collections from Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, and Routledge. She currently serves on the Executive Board of the American Society of Comparative Law and on the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She has advised international organizations and government officials on constitutional matters including judicial power, rights protection, and constitutional reform.

Professor Tew holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Distinction in Research Prize in the Arts and Humanities in 2012 by St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. While at the University of Cambridge, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Student Law Review. She received her first law degree from the University of Cambridge graduating with Double First Class Honors. She graduated with a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Harvard Law School after winning the Cambridge-Harvard Law Link scholarship awarded to the top two final-year law graduates from the University of Cambridge entering Harvard Law School. She is a member of the New York state bar. Before joining the faculty at Georgetown Law, she held research fellowships at Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law.

Previous Education

Harvard University Master of Laws (LL.M.) 2008
University of Cambridge B.A. in Law (First Class Hons) 2007

Links

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/yvonne-tew
https://www.yvonnetew.com

I am me!! The usual cliched stuff friendly,vivacious, caring,affable etc. On a serious note here is a bit about me... I am a confident and talkative person. I believe in working very hard and also having fun...a kind of balancing act! Friends say that I am full of zest for life and brimming with enthusiasm for any activity. An inquisitive and probing child, I found a soul mate in Science which answered to a great extent all my ‘whys’ ‘hows’ and ‘whens’, still leaving a few mysteries for me to fathom. My ambition in life is to be ? Someone who excels in any field she cares to follow.I would want to share my life’s experiences for it would be criminal to let it gather dust when it could benefit others, be it through teaching or research.

I come from the suburbs of Chicago and attended Yale University for a BA in Comparative Literature. There I studied ancient and modern languages—especially Latin, Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew—and wrote my thesis on humanists and humanism in early modern Europe. I got hooked inescapably on pedagogy when, last summer, I taught a Latin class to students in Brooklyn, New York. With Cambridge’s MPhil in Early Modern History I will investigate the history of learning in early modern Germany; as an historian I intend to address the legacy of classical humanism and the dark arts of scholarship. I am honored to be a member of the Gates community.

Previous Education

Yale University

I began my undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University in Utah as a Conservation Biology major with the goal of intimately understanding the natural world and contributing to its protection in the face of rapid environmental change. As I delved into research topics such as plant community shifts with climate change, I learned how crucial computational tools and approaches are in addressing the complexity of global change, and as result, added a Bioinformatics major. At the same time, doing field work in the deserts and mountains of the American West reaffirmed to me the importance of close contact with the ecosystems we seek to understand in order to better protect and manage them. As a Plant Sciences PhD candidate at Cambridge, I plan to leverage both computer modeling and empirical field approaches to predicting the biogeography and resilience of alpine plants in the face of climate change. My research aims to inform both eco-evolutionary theory and conservation efforts for sensitive alpine systems. I care deeply about cultivating our human relationship with nature, making it one of my goals as a scientist and a citizen to help engage others in conservation through outreach and education. I am thrilled to join and learn from the vibrant, interdisciplinary Gates Cambridge community as we do our part to address complex global issues.

Previous Education

Brigham Young University Utah

Pursuing an MPhil in Medical Sciences (Oncology) at Cambridge will provide me with enormous academic, cultural, and personal opportunities. I will be studying in the laboratory of Dr Doug Winton, who investigates the connection between stem cell development and carcinogenesis. After completing my term I plan to pursue an MD/PhD degree with an emphasis on the interaction between cancer and the immune system.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Global Health and English Literature at Arizona State University. I then spent two years as a Post-Bachelor Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. At IHME, I worked primarily on two projects: the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study and Medtronic Philanthropy’s HealthRise Project. Through this work, I grew to understand the power of quantitative methodology to answer global health’s most pressing questions. Following my MPhil in Epidemiology at Cambridge, I moved to Oxford for a DPhil in Population Health with the support of a Nuffield Department of Population Health Scholarship. My DPhil research examined lifestyle risk factors (such as smoking and drinking) and premature mortality in Mexico, Cuba, and the United States.

I am now Principal Scientist, Cancer Disparities Research at the American Cancer Society. The aim of this research is to highlight opportunities to improve cancer prevention and control, particularly among groups that are falling behind. Everyone deserves to live a long, healthy, cancer-free life.

Previous Education

Arizona State University

I am a current MD/PhD student split between the University of Colorado-School of Medicine and the University of Cambridge. As an applied mathematician/software engineer turned future physician, I am excited to apply my computational and mathematical background to help in the discovery of mechanisms behind inflammatory diseases of the gut.In my PhD portion of my training in Biotechnology and Mathematics/Statistics where I work with Dr. Roisin Owens and Dr. Sergio Bacallado on developing a mathematical/statistical tools for validating bioelectronic models of the gut. Previously, I worked as a Software Engineer at Uber in San Francisco for 3 years. I have my MPhil at Cambridge working at the Sanger Institute. I completed my BS in Applied Mathematics at University of Colorado-Boulder, where I am originally from.

Previous Education

University of Colorado at Denver Medicine 2026
University of Cambridge Biological Sciences 2018
University of Colorado at Boulder Applied Mathematics 2013

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kumarthurimella
http://kumarthurimella.com