I recently graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. With the generous help of the Gates Cambridge Trust, I am entering my third year in the four year PhD program in Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disease at the Institute of Metabolic Science. My PhD project will focus on the molecular basis of the incretin effect. Specifically, I will be using various imaging techniques to analyze the nutrient sensing capabilities of intestinal enteroendocrine cells, as well as the vesicle dynamics of incretin hormones. Hopefully, by understanding the intricacies of stimulus-secretion coupling mechanisms in intestinal enteroendocrine cells we will be closer to harnessing the incretin effect in therapies aimed at improving the glucose tolerance of patients with type 2 diabetes.
I grew up in Ogbomoso, Nigeria and attended Ladoke Akintola University of Technology where I completed a BTech degree in Chemistry. As an undergraduate in Prof Olugbenga Bello’s lab, I synthesized activated carbon from agricultural wastes to remove endocrine disrupting chemicals from wastewater. I also developed a machine learning model that predicts the adsorption efficiency of activated carbon. My passion to solve real-world problem made climate change a fascinating topic for my MPhil degree in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. For this degree, I was awarded Mastercard Foundation scholarship to study the properties of materials for carbon capture at atomic scale in Prof Angelos Michaelides’ group. In my PhD research, I will use state-of-the-art computer simulation approaches to discover and understand the properties of next-generation materials for carbon capture. This work will contribute to climate change mitigation and clean energy transition. I am immensely grateful to have been selected for this prestigious scholarship. With the enriching networks and the opportunities that the scholarship provides, I hope to make a valuable contribution to the Gates Cambridge community and the world at large.
University of Cambridge Chemistry 2023
Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Chemistry 2020
The idea of harnessing the immune system to treat cancer is fascinating to me. Moreover, during my medical training in Nigeria, I was deeply moved by the experiences of cancer patients, especially with the very limited treatment options available. This combination of curiosity and compassion inspired me to pursue a career at the intersection of excellent patient care and cutting-edge cancer research. I subsequently received the Clarendon scholarship for a Masters at the University of Oxford, where my research was on the innate immune cGAS-STING signalling in cancer, under the supervision of Dr Eileen Parkes. At Cambridge, I have joined Dr Maike de la Roche's group to explore how hedgehog signalling is orchestrated in cytotoxic immune cells during the antitumor response. Mechanistic insights from this work, and others, will potentially enable better design of advanced cellular therapies, bringing hope to numerous patients. Ultimately, I plan to contribute significantly to efforts aimed at expanding access to transformative therapies globally, and alleviate the unacceptable disparities currently observed. I feel incredibly honoured to have joined the Gates Cambridge community and look forward to an enriching experience with other young leaders from across the world.
University of Oxford Integrated Immunology 2021
University of Ibadan Medicine and Surgery 2019
The pulse of being in one of the most prestigious seats of learning leaves you in awe. The academic culture is exemplary and I consider it a privilege to be here. I expect my time here to prove to be one of the most remarkable and rewarding experiences.
Most clinical technologies for detecting protein biomarkers are antibody based. As an alternative approach, my research focuses on the development of protein-catalyzed capture agents (PCCs) – compounds that possess the affinities and specificities of antibodies, but also are highly stable on the shelf and in vivo. PCCs are selected for specific binding through synthetic combinatorial peptide library methodologies that make use of the target protein as the catalyst for assembling a multivalent ligand. We are exploiting the small size, low cost, and rapid synthesis of PCCs to monitor biomarkers to detect cancer and other serious diseases.
Nick Ahamed is a Deputy Executive Director at Priorities USA, covering political partnerships, analytics and opinion research. In that role, he leads Priorities’ political operation by supporting and working with progressive allies. He also oversees the organization’s analytics and opinion research strategy, ensuring our messages are developed, tested, and delivered rigorously. Previously, he served as the Director of Analytics at Priorities, guiding targeting, ad testing, election forecasting and resource allocation for the largest outside effort to defeat Donald Trump. In 2017, he won the Gates Scholarship to research bias in voter turnout models at the University of Cambridge, from where he holds a MPhil in Politics and International Relations.
Stanford University
My experience growing up in Yemeni, Kenyan, and Canadian communities has intrinsically shaped my interests in human rights, disarmament, and diaspora studies. From 2020-2022, I was a research assistant with the Stanford Graduate School of Education supporting the creation of the World Education Reform Database. In addition, during my time at the Reach Alliance, I conducted research examining the importance of employing local grassroots solutions to misinformation in conflict settings. Building on the combination of my degree from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and my professional experiences with organizations such as Grand Challenges Canada and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, I intend to solidify my academic interest in African women's peacebuilding. In the MPhil in African Studies course, I will utilize comparative policy analyses to examine how disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) initiatives in Africa have integrated female ex-combatants into their framework. I strongly believe that there is a social imperative to DDR work, and a failure to address inadequacies in those structures means a stronger chance of conflict reoccurring.
University of Toronto Social Sciences 2022
I came to Cambridge in 2009 to study for the MPhil and then PhD in epidemiology. I hold an MD degree in medicine from Tehran University and prior to attending Cambridge University worked on a GFATM funded Malaria control project at the United Nations Development Programme office in Iran. Upon completion of my studies at Cambridge, I joined UCL and worked on a public health modelling project to forecast the burden of cardiovascular disease, dementia and disability over the next 25 years in the UK and four European countries, to measure the impact of public health policies and interventions on these outcomes. I then joined Imperial College London as Assistant Professor in Epidemiology of Ageing to continue my research on dementia.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/s.ahmadi-abhari
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-ahmadi-abhari-a3043334
I was first exposed to the quantum world during my time in Sydney, Australia, where I completed my BSc in physics and statistics. Combining the fields of quantum error correction with theoretical condensed matter physics, my undergraduate thesis investigated problems such as how to safely store quantum information for longer periods of time. Questions such as these will not only be crucial for the future success of commercial quantum computing, but also help us better understand the quantum world itself. As a research community, we are on the brink of realising controllable, scalable quantum systems for the first time - giving us the unprecedented ability to test and improve upon ideas across quantum theory. I am excited to continue exploring these areas through a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, drawing upon ideas from both quantum information and condensed matter physics. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, I am honoured to join such a diverse and collaborative academic community, through which I aim to continue embracing this interdisciplinary approach to my studies and future research.
University of Sydney Physics and Statistics 2022
I am a linguist and language enthusiast who undertook my PhD at Cambridge on word-order variation in the endangered, indigenous Uralic language Lule Sámi, spoken in parts of Northern Norway and Sweden. I am currently Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Lule Sámi at Nord University in Bodo, Norway.
I was born in Aba, Nigeria, immigrated to the United States at the age of 2, and have been living in New York City ever since. I was the class of 2012 at Yale University, where I majored in evolutionary biology. I am interested in microbial evolution and medicine and at Yale conducted research examining how phage (viruses that infect bacteria) can be engineered to better kill their hosts. At Cambridge, I will pursue an MPhil in Biochemistry and study phage abortive infection, an altruistic mechanism bacteria employ that protects them from the ravages of phage attack. I plan to obtain more knowledge on the molecular dynamics of phage-host interactions. It is my hope that my work will be applied to the growing research on treating antibiotic resistant infections with phage. After my time at Cambridge, I plan to apply to MD-PhD programs. I hope to build a career as an infectious disease specialist and a scientist committed to developing new treatments for microbial diseases.
During my PhD studies, I plan to develop models for the analysis of monetary policy. I am particularly interested in how uncertainty about the economic outlook affects the performance of monetary policy. I am grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust for funding my studies.
Yusef Al-Jarani is a Gates Cambridge and Harry S. Truman Scholar. In 2013, he co-founded Phoenix Development Fund, a non-profit organization that provides pro bono business development services to community-minded small businesses in the South Side of Chicago. Yusef received his BA from the University of Chicago in Political Science with Honors, after which he spent a year in the UK studying for his MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has been a practicing attorney since receiving his JD at Yale Law School.
University of Chicago
I am a historian of poverty and social exclusion in colonial India, with a focus on South Indian social reform movements between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The transnational circulation of Indian reform movements in Southeast Asia and the social history of the Tamil diaspora are related areas of interest. My current book project traces the history of prohibition's introduction in India, positioning the subject at the intersection of provincial and national politics, and global temperance reform. A second project examines the impact of temperance and prohibition movements, as a subset of dietary reform, in late colonial India and Malaya.My work has been published in Modern Asian Studies and the Indian Economic and Social History Review. I currently convene courses in alcohol and drug history and modern Indian history at Hong Kong University.
National University of Singapore B.A. (Hons) History 2003
Growing up a child of immigrants in the heart of Orange County, I was graced with the so-called hyphenated identity of a Muslim-Syrian-American. That hyphen, the moment of mediation between two seemingly disparate things, has served as the foundation for my academic interests and future aspirations. It fuels my passion for intersectional issues as an activist and advocate for educational and environmental justice in South Los Angeles. It has also fostered an intellectual curiosity that lead me to pursue a double major in Human Biology & Society and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where I was able to conduct research on health disparities while exploring the use of quantitative research methods in the Humanities. As a Gates Scholar, I hope to continue this narrative by pursuing an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. My proposed research centers on the theme of translation; I situate this not only as a practice but also as a mediative process that has shaped the development and reification of certain historical, linguistic, and cultural legacies in science and medicine. As an aspiring activist and physician-scholar, I ultimately hope to employ this critical framework and the global network of the Gates Cambridge community in the development and practice of a more socially attuned and interdisciplinary medicine.
University of California Los Angeles