Directory

My research focuses on the heritage of mass repression, Soviet and post-Soviet memorialization and heritagization, grievability and memory, and contested memory. I am specifically interested in how post-repression societies variously portray suffering, loss, perpetration, and victimhood at sites associated with mass violence. The overarching goal is to analyze how the heritage of past violence can be instrumentalized in order to avoid reckoning with past violence and, further, how this heritage can be weaponized in order to further contemporary violence. My research interests also include preservation and tourism at sites of mass repression, materiality and memorialization, and heritage and climate change. My doctoral dissertation title was 'The Heritage of Repression: Memory, Commemoration, and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia'. It focused on changing patterns of commemoration and memorialization of Soviet repression at sites in Russia connected to the former gulag system and Great Terror, with a special focus on concepts of 'grievability' (as conceived by Judith Butler) and my complementary concept of 'blameability'. It also introduced a theoretical model for categorizing and thinking through heritage sites' representations of victims and perpetrators.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge
University of California, Berkeley

My phd in epidemiology will focus on patterns of individual dietary ‘lifestyle choices’ and how these are influenced by multiple social determinants, particularly the contribution of the physical environment. After migrating to many cities since growing up in a small town near canada’s point pelee national park in south-western ontario, I am thrilled to be studying in cambridge with the support of a Gates Scholarship. Since completing a Master’s in Life Sciences (Edinburgh) and a Master’s in Public Health (Columbia), I have worked as a health policy analyst at Rand Europe, a not-for-profit research organisation. My goal is to develop a career in the intersection of academia and policy, working closely with communities and governments to support the translation of research evidence into preventive action for tackling disparities in population health and well-being.

I am a proud New Jerseyan by birth and rearing. I earned my B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania where I got my start in my now career-long focus on insulin and its actions in the lab of Dr. Bryan Wolf. Thereafter I came to Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. I earned my M.Phil. in Clinical Biochemistry as a member of Clare College at the Institute of Metabolic Science under Dr. Robert Semple by modeling syndromes of severe insulin resistance in cell culture models. I next continued my research on insulin resistance in the lab of Dr. Domenico Accili at Columbia University in New York, where I graduated from the M.D./Ph.D. program in 2016. I have since stayed on at Columbia to complete my residency in internal medicine and fellowship in endocrinology. I am currently Assistant Professor of Medicine within the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism at Columbia University Medical Center. I am the leader of a research group studying the role of insulin in hepatic lipid metabolism in human subjects.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania BA, Biology 2008

Julie is an attorney at Farallon Capital Management, an institutional asset management firm based in San Francisco, California. At Farallon, among other things, she designed and implemented a fossil--fuel filter, the first to be applied to a multi-strategy hedge fund. Julie joined Farallon in 2007 after working as a corporate associate at Morrison & Foerster, also in San Francisco. Her work there included assessing a proposal for Sudan-related divestment by a large university. Julie obtained an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge in 2002, where she wrote a thesis on the use of referendums. Julie has a J.D. from Columbia University Law School and a B.A. with honors in Economics and English from Duke University.

Tara Patricia Cookson is a Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor of Gender, Development and Global Public Policy at the University of British Columbia's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and the cofounder of Ladysmith, a feminist research consultancy that helps international organizations collect, analyze and take action on gender data. In her role at Ladysmith she has led evidence-driven projects for UN Women, UNICEF, the International Labour Organization, Global Affairs Canada, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Facebook, among others. She is also author of the award winning book Unjust Conditions: Women's Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs, based on the research she conducted while a Gates Cambridge Scholar and member of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge (2011-2015).

Links

https://ladysmithcollective.com
https://sppga.ubc.ca/profile/tara-cookson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/taracookson

During my undergraduate studies in geophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I developed a fascination with glaciers and the Arctic, a passion that has taken me to Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland and Iceland. My research has focused on glaciology and Arctic hydrology, including studying surface strain rates on the Taku Glacier in Southeast Alaska through the Juneau Icefield Research Program and examining trends in the timing of Siberian river ice breakup using satellite imagery in UNC’s Global Hydrology Lab. After visiting the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2013, I became particularly interested in studying the dramatic retreat of Greenland’s large outlet glaciers and the complex processes that govern their flow. At Cambridge, I will pursue my MPhil in Polar Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, where I will focus on researching feedbacks between basal hydrology and flow in tidewater glaciers in West Greenland. Through the use of mathematical modeling of glacier flow, I seek to better understand how Greenland’s glaciers are responding to climate warming as part of efforts to improve sea level rise predictions. I am honored and excited to join the diverse Gates Cambridge community and to engage in the groundbreaking polar research and outreach at the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Previous Education

University of North Carolina

During my time at Cambridge I researched children in the Upper Palaeolithic. I looked at art, especially finger flutings done in France and Spain to determine the ages and biological sex of the artists. Hopefully this will also lead to a better understanding of children's lives in the Upper Palaeolithic. I am also very interested and active in archaeological outreach for youths, hoping to foster their interest in the past.

I currently live in Wiltshire, UK, and work for English Heritage as a curator, hoping to inspire people to learn more about the past and preserve heritage.

Previous Education

University of York MSc, Early Prehistory 2008
Columbia University B.A., Ancient Studies 2007

I am broadly interested in using ecological and mathematical approaches to answer questions in infectious disease epidemiology. I did my masters and PhD in Dr. Caroline Trotter’s group in the Disease Dynamics Unit at Cambridge, where I applied mathematical modelling techniques and traditional epidemiological analysis to better understand and reduce the burden of meningitis in the African meningitis belt. In 2019 I joined the Vaccine Epidemiology Research Group led by Professor Nick Grassly at Imperial College, where I study the epidemiology of vaccine-derived polioviruses.

Previous Education

Princeton University

Links

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/l.cooper
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lvcooper

My academic training in History and Literature as an undergraduate at Harvard motivated me to pursue a career in government, helping to craft policies that address historically embedded social inequality. This drive has led me to work on the Biden-Harris campaign and transition team, serve as Confidential Assistant to Secretary Miguel Cardona at the U.S. Department of Education, and do research and communications work for the Governor of California. I have also spent a year in Sydney, Australia as a Fulbright Scholar researching gender and higher education policy. I am excited to pursue an MPhil in Public Policy at Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. I hope to develop research expertise and international perspective that will help me pursue a career in policy development and implementation, particularly focused on housing and education.

Previous Education

Harvard University History and Literature
Western Sydney University Policy and History

I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, spending my weekends camping on mountaintops and coastlines, with my amazing parents, little brother, and friends, staring up at the starry night next to a warm fire. I always yearned to learn more about the night sky, a path that eventually led me to my undergraduate study of Astrophysics at Harvard University. I have researched several aspects of observational cosmology, the study and measurement of the earliest signals from the universe, and what they tell us about how the universe began, and its eventual fate. I have often partnered with several organizations to create outreach programs in which we teach young students, both in Boston and Puerto Rico, about the cosmic and human past, hoping to instill intellectual curiosity and empower them to pursue their passions. At the same time, I strove to understand humanity’s more immediate past by completing a secondary field in Archaeology, inspired by the questions I held concerning who had previously stared at the stars from those same coastlines in Puerto Rico. Embarking on an MPhil in Archeology of the Americas, with a focus on Archeoastronomy, I hope to illuminate the deep astronomical traditions of Ancient American peoples, and how these help inform our own conception of the universe, our history, and ourselves.

Previous Education

Harvard University Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) Astrophysics - Physics 2019

I have a profound belief in the transformative potential of literature, and as a Gates scholar I will be researching literature’s ability to both reflect and evoke societal change. I was born and raised in Belgium, but my love for literature took me to the University of Cambridge, where I first became acquainted with feminist literary theory. As a master’s student in Gender at the London School of Economics, I researched the role of narrative in the #MeToo movement and gained a lasting interest in the politics and ethics of representation. My doctoral research will focus on feminist revisionist literature, the genre in which contemporary authors subvert, adapt, or otherwise engage with canonical texts in order to highlight female voice and subjectivity. Through my work, I hope not only to shed light on a popular strand of contemporary women’s writing, but also to research the epistemic function of this literature, as I believe that the stories we tell affect what our social, cultural, and political movements can achieve. I am very honoured to be joining the Gates Cambridge community, and I am looking forward to learning from and collaborating with like-minded scholars.

Previous Education

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Western Literature 2021
London School of Economics & Political Science Gender 2020
University of Cambridge English 2018

I became interested in studying the relationship between politics and photography while living in Buenos Aires in 2008. As a Comparative Literature major at Cornell University, I studied photography in both fine-art classes and as a mode of literary, political, and historical analysis. In 2012, I travelled to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay to research the repurposed family photo album in the context of historical memory in these countries. Between 2014 and 2016, I studied between Spain, Portugal and Scotland for the Erasmus Mundus Master’s course Crossways in Cultural Narratives. My MA dissertation analysed the photomontages of German-born Argentine artist Grete Stern. With Dr. Joanna Page at the Centre for Latin American Studies, I will investigate the history of photomontage in Argentina and shed light on this technique’s prevalence in contemporary visual culture of the Southern Cone.

Previous Education

University of St Andrews Cultural Narratives 2016
Cornell University Latin American Studies 2014

Previous Education

Harvard University EdM Mind, Brain & Education 2003
Brown University ScB Cognitive Neuroscience 2002

I am fascinated by the potential of emerging biomedical tools to treat new diseases. A native of Massachusetts, I graduated from Harvard University, where I studied neuroscience in several contexts, including retinal disease in premature infants, nontraditional symptoms in Alzheimer's disease patients, and synaptic patterning in the developing brain. More recently, I conducted thesis research into how young neurons decide to assemble specific circuits in the outer retina. While teaching children throughout the US and Southeast Asia, I have also witnessed the personal challenges of healthcare access around the world. These experiences have guided my belief that biomedical research must combine technical progress with new modes of development and distribution. At Cambridge I will pursue an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise, which will prepare me to address these questions through a career in medicine. Outside my studies I hope to continue my other interests in jazz music, youth coaching, and woodworking.

Previous Education

Harvard University

Previous Education

University of Notre Dame B.A. Political Science 2012