Directory

I grew up in Lebanon and completed my undergraduate education in Chemical Engineering at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik. My previous research primarily focused on the resource security continuum, encompassing projects related to food, water, and energy security. While addressing these critical challenges, I became increasingly mindful of the health implications of our decisions in these areas. As we navigate these transformations, it is evident that numerous diseases continue to claim lives, persisting as severe, unresolved clinical conditions. Motivated by this awareness, I resolved to channel my background in Chemical Engineering towards contributing to the field of healthcare. This led me to pursue further studies by enrolling in the MPhil program in Advanced Chemical Engineering at Cambridge, generously supported by a scholarship from the Cambridge Trust and the Bseisu Foundation. Here, my research is currently dedicated to developing theranostic metal-organic frameworks aimed at facilitating certain forms of cancer treatment. As I pursue both my master's and Ph.D., my aim is to contribute significantly to this field with the goal of improving patient outcomes and alleviating the global burden of disease.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Advanced Chemical Engineering 2024
Holy Spirit University Kaslik Chemical Engineering 2023

I am a medievalist particularly interested in the reception of antiquity and the commentary practice in the Middle Ages, with a special focus on the traditions of Dante Commentary. I am currently revising my new critical edition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary (1385-96) on Dante’s Commedia for publication (Rome: Salerno Editrice). With Ambrogio Camozzi, I have recently concluded a monograph (Brepols, 2018) on the oldest ‘Florentine’ version of the life of Alexander the Great (c. 1350), witnessed by a lavishly illuminated manuscript now at the Jagiellonian Library, Kraków. I have also started to work on my next book-length project, ‘Dante and Late Medieval Pisa’, whose aim is to explore the vibrant and influential reception of Dante’s Commedia in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Pisa, especially in relation to the city’s longstanding political and cultural rivalry with Florence. In the field of Neo-Latin Studies, I am currently preparing the critical edition of XV Century anonymous Breve Compendium et utile super tota Dantis Allegherii Comedia.

Previous Education

University of Pisa MA Italian 2005

As an undergraduate physics student at King’s College London, I attended the Princeton Physics of Life seminar series. There, I was inspired by lectures indicating how physics can improve the understanding of biology, for instance, by describing the flight of birds using spin models. This also works the other way around; physics and technology can be advanced by mimicking nature’s solutions that were refined over the course of evolution. This motivated my summer research project that investigated how ant colonies’ behaviour can help optimize solutions to path-finding problems such as the ones in extra-terrestrial surface exploration. These bio-inspired technologies can not only aid humanity but also have potential benefits to the environment. (Optimized vehicle routing can reduce CO2 emissions and spare energy significantly.)My PhD would focus on exploring the information processing capabilities of a model of motile cilia. Apart from featuring interesting and mostly unexplored dynamics, the model could also form the basis of a new computational method that would be more suited for solving certain problems by creating a physical-based equivalent of a neural network.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Physics 2023
King's College London (University of London) Physics with Theoretical Phys. 2022

I will be undertaking an MPhil in Environment, Society & Development in order to build upon the experience I have of working in the field of development in Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, and the UK. My focus will be on sustainable development and the complex dynamics that result from the interaction between people and their environment.

The evolutionary introduction of language in the human species has given us a unique ability to cooperate in large and highly adaptable social groups. Our capacity for language allows us to live according to imagined cultural orders, such as the legal and economic frameworks that govern civic life. These frameworks exist in our shared imagination and are sustained through communication networks, linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. These shared beliefs shape our societies and our world, and form the basis of study of most of the humanities. History has shown us the great consequences and opportunities of our shared beliefs, which determine our cultural values and prejudices. By observing and understanding language structure, we learn more about ourselves and the world which we create. We also learn about the mechanisms which will be required to create the kind of world we would like to live in.

Links

http://inspiredialogue.org

As an undergraduate at Duke University, I developed a keen interest in utilizing computational models to investigate the underlying mechanisms of human disease. I resolved to concentrate my career on connecting biology, mathematics, and computer science, with a focus on applications to human health. Shortly after graduating from Duke with a BSc in Computational Biology, I joined the laboratory of Dr. Francis Collins at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), where I studied the molecular underpinnings of diabetes using genetic and genomic techniques. While at the NIH, I became acutely aware of the health inequities that persist worldwide, and I pursued training to prepare myself for a career focused on addressing systemic health inequities. During my doctoral training at Cambridge, I plan to combine my interests in human disease and health inequities to study the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes (T2D) across diverse ancestries. It is my hope that my doctoral research will enhance the treatment and prevention of T2D for all people. I am immensely grateful and humbled to join the Gates Cambridge community, and I look forward to learning from the other scholars across diverse disciplines.

Previous Education

Duke University Computational Biology 2018

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