Directory

My research at Cambridge is about the concept of mental disorder. I am researching how classifications and diagnoses can influence and interact with the ways that mental disorders are experienced and expressed—and how these interactions are taken into account by psychiatrists when they write patient notes and make diagnoses. These interactions are called "looping effects" when our classifications have to be updated to stay on top of the new experiences and expressions which they themselves created. My hope is that a careful analysis of these looping effects, and how they factor into practice, can help us better understand the concept of mental disorder. My previous research was focused on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Many Worlds interpretation. This work was part of my MSci at King's College London. My focus has since shifted to the philosophy of psychiatry, but my interest in the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of science remains.

Previous Education

King's College London (University of London) Physics and Philosophy 2020

Links

http://hsherl.github.io

My research focuses on Hindu-Muslim relations in the public sphere of colonial North India c. 1880-1930 with particular reference to the printing of polemical and controversial works.

Having studied and taught in the Islamic Seminaries of Iran for almost a decade, I then joined the University of Cambridge, where I completed an MPhil and PhD. in Middle Eastern studies.
I developed a strong interest for mental health and psychology and this interest brought me back to the University of Cambridge a year after the completion of my PhD. Right now I am training as studying Psychotherapy at the faculty of education.

The main focus of my research right now is the intersection between psychotherapy and spiritual development.

Previous Education

Qom Theological Centre
University of Cambridge

As a medical doctor from South Africa working in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I witness profound health inequities impacting vulnerable populations. Limited resources and access barriers cause poorer health outcomes for these communities. This motivated me as a University of Cape Town (UCT) student to seek solutions. While earning my MBChB and Biomedical Science honours (Immunology & Infectious Diseases), I co-founded an mHealth platform aimed at addressing some of these healthcare access challenges.This experience fuelled my passion for using technology to bridge health gaps. Cambridge’s MPhil in Translating Devices and Advanced Therapies Research offers the chance to gain crucial expertise and practical knowledge to translate concepts into impactful solutions. My long-term vision is to be a clinician-scientist and innovator dedicated to creating sustainable, ethical, scalable health solutions. I aim for far-reaching positive impact via interventions for diverse settings – urban/rural South Africa and other resource-limited areas globally. I am honoured to join the Gates-Cambridge community and pursue these goals alongside scholars sharing the commitment to leading positive social impact via academic pursuit.

Previous Education

University of Cape Town Biomedical Science-Immunology
University of Cape Town Clinical Medicine and Surgery

My undergraduate qualification is in Mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and I have worked as a Manufacturing Manager for Unilever in India. In 2010, I decided to change my career path and study economics as I found that I had an aptitude for research and was interested in issues relevant to the social and economic problems facing India. I completed a Graduate Diploma in Economics and an MPhil in Economic Research at Cambridge and am now in the third year of my PhD. My research interests lie in the fields of Political Economics, Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics, more specifically in looking at the social, political and economic causes and effects of conflict in developing countries, the political economy of control and use of natural resources in developing countries and issues of identity in the context of politics and conflict. I am currently a visiting fellow at Université de Namur, Belgium as part of the PODER network.

Links

http://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/SitePages/anand-shrivastava.aspx
https://sites.google.com/site/anandshrivastava1984

Born in 1986 in Kyiv, Ukraine, Iryna Shuvalova has authored five award-winning books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells (Lost Horse Press, 2019). Her most recent and fifth book of poetry Stoneorchardwoods (2020) has been named book of the year by Ukraine’s LitAktsent Prize for Literature and received the Special Prize of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Book Award. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the first anthology of queer writing in Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Modern Poetry in Translation, The White Review, Literary Hub, Die Zeit, and others. She is a member of PEN Ukraine.

Shuvalova's work as a translator includes translations into Ukrainian of novels by Yann Martel and Virginia Woolf, as well as poems by Ted Hughes, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald. She has also translated into English the writing of modern and contemporary Ukrainian poets, including Lesia Ukrainka, Mykola Bazhan, Iurii Klen, Mykola Zerov, Ostap Slyvynskyi, and others. Her translations appeared in Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Ambit, as well as multiple anthologies.

Shuvalova's research interests lie at the intersection of culture and politics in Eastern Europe. Her forthcoming academic monograph 'Donbas Is My Sparta': Identity and Belonging in the Songs of the Russo-Ukrainian War explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian society. She holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar. In the summer of 2023, she will be joining the University of Oslo as a postdoctoral research fellow.

Previous Education

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Dartmouth College

Links

https://irynashuvalova.com
https://cambridge.academia.edu/IrynaShuvalova
https://ua.linkedin.com/in/shuvalova

Amarynth is a researcher at the University of Cambridge, focused on the future of cities. Her experience spans the public and private sectors, and includes consulting in government relations and public policy in the US, and work for Seoul Metropolitan Government in South Korea as a Luce Scholar. Amarynth’s focus areas include sustainable city systems, affordable housing, and systemic inequality. Amarynth has an MPhil in Planning Growth and Regeneration from Cambridge University where she was a Gates Scholar and graduated with merit, and a BA, summa cum laude, from Barnard College, Columbia University.

Previous Education

Barnard College

While studying Human Geography and Sociology at the University of Toronto, my professors nurtured my interest in examining social inequality and segregation in urban space. I was inspired to contemplate justice-oriented visions of city building and analyze uneven development and political fragmentation within cities which are more pronounced now than ever. At Cambridge, my research will consider how citizen-led development can be employed as a tool for empowering the urban poor in the context of housing inequality and forced evictions from informal settlements in Pakistan. Specifically, I will investigate how cross-class alliances can enhance marginalized groups’ political claims-making abilities and help them assert their status as legitimate urban citizens. Urban theories and policies are largely based on the experiences of a select few cities in the Global North. In response, my scholarly aim is to highlight diverse Southern urban experiences, which will reveal important socio-political particularities about life in cities of the Global South. By inspiring policymakers and researchers, I hope to achieve a future where cities are not divided or fragmented but rather inclusive spaces of collaboration between residents. I am grateful and excited, and humbled most of all, to be joining a community of students who share a strong commitment to changing the world for the better.

Previous Education

University of Toronto Geography 2019
University of Toronto Human Geography, Sociology, Writing & Rhetoric 2018

I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned early that the media can either amplify voices or erase them. That question — who gets to speak, and who gets heard — has shaped everything I've done since.As an MPhil student in Modern South Asian Studies at Cambridge, I am investigating how colonial structures, including inherited laws, concentrated ownership, and knowledge hierarchies, continue to shape Pakistan's media governance. I call this the "coloniality of media," and my work is about decolonizing media governance. I aim to uncover how these structures operate and document the alternatives already thriving outside this logic: community radio, vernacular platforms, networks that refuse to wait for permission.Underpinning my research is a conviction: diagnosis without action is incomplete. I believe that a media landscape rooted in equity and local knowledge is not just possible; it is necessary.I am honored to join a community of scholars who believe that where you come from should never determine how far you can go, and that knowledge, ultimately, is meant to serve.

Previous Education

Greenwich University Economics and Finance 2023

Having been raised a Muslim, I have always carried in my heart a fascination with the vastness of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the richness of the lived experience of modern Muslims. After graduating from Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas, I pursued an A.B. in History at Princeton University, where my interests in the history of Islam and the practice of medicine converged in research inquiring into the history of medicine in the Muslim world. This culminated in my graduating thesis which looked at paradigms of health in the late Nation of Islam. Through my MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Cambridge, I hope to focus on how a key socio-intellectual class in diasporic Muslim communities, the ulama (traditionally educated Islamic scholars), have engaged modern biomedicine and promoted varied paradigms and practices of health within Western Muslim populations. These important yet neglected histories will contribute to the project of building critical intellectual bridges between physicians/public-health experts and Muslim leaders like the ulama, with the goal of said enterprise laying not in producing a unilateral relationship between either of these domains but a symbiotic one. **Shaffin will commence his MPhil study in 2023.

Previous Education

Princeton University History 2022

I want to acquire as much experience as I can in my PhD program, experiences that I can take back home to Iceland with me and enrich the Icelandic research community. In the future I see myself as a researcher. My PhD project is in the field of structural biology and in it I am targeting a protein-protein interaction involved in the first step of metastasis for drug discovery using a fragment-based approach. The first three years have been challenging and rewarding.

Previous Education

Princeton University Molecular Biology, Applied and Computational Mathematics 2011
University of Oxford Biochemistry 2010

Neuroscience has been considered one of the final frontiers of science; a labyrinth of cellular connections that we still barely understand. So much of what makes the brain amazing can also lead to devastating disease. The drive to discover solutions to unanswered questions has been my motivation as a research scientist. I have been provided the unique opportunity to develop my own experiments and lead projects which contributed to the breakthrough of a novel drug into clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease. Seeing the impact innovative research has on patients’ lives has solidified my desire to pursue a career focused on scientific advancements in neurodegeneration. For my PhD in Clinical Neuroscience, I will study new methods identifying cellular irregularities in ALS with the use of patient derived cell lines. ALS was thought to be strictly a motor neuron disease, but recent advancements have shown that the support cells, astrocytes, could cause aspects of disease pathology. I hope that studying three dimensional cell organoids will shine light on new therapeutic pathways for patients in need and bridge the gap between conventional two dimensional cell cultures and clinical trials. I am honored to be joining the Gates Cambridge community, surrounded by diverse scholars working to make a difference around the world.

Previous Education

Allegheny College

http://jaysilver.net

After graduating from Stanford University in 2009 with a B.A. in international relations and economics, I spent the past four years working in international development research and practice, most recently with the global health policy team at the Center for Global Development. This year, I am excited to be pursuing an MPhil in Public Health with support from the Gates Cambridge Trust. Driven by the belief that we have an ethical obligation to save as many lives as possible with the resources at our disposal, my interests lie at the intersection of global health and economics, particularly with regard to efficient and equitable resource allocation (priority-setting) and incentive structures to maximize “value for money” in health policy. It is my hope that my studies at Cambridge will enable me to be a stronger advocate for evidence-based public health decision-making.

Links

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/finest-hour-online/student-papers/662-grand-strategies