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I am currently studying bioengineering with a concentration in cellular and tissue engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As an undergraduate student, I have engaged myself in neuroscience and bioengineering research, which has fostered my passion to study ocular pathology in the scope of neuroscience. During my MPhil in Medical Sciences at Cambridge, I will study the aetiology of glaucoma and the mechanisms of cell death, which can provide further insight into developing novel therapeutic options. I am honoured and excited to join the dynamic group of scholars that make up the Gates Cambridge community.

Previous Education

University of Illinois, Chicago

I grew up in Quebec and lived in New Mexico, before studying comparative politics at Harvard and working in China. At the Judge Business School, I researched the psychology of social networks and their impact on leadership, innovation and performance in organizations. I then went on to work as a strategy consultant for Roland Berger and cofounded Fluent.ai, a speech recognition startup.

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http://linkedin.com/in/desruisseaux

My experiences studying Medical Anthropology, Global Health, African Studies, and Gender Studies at Princeton expanded my understanding of social inequality and its impact on sexual health around the world. Through my ethnographic projects studying pregnant women during the pandemic and women using doula services, I recognized the lived experiences of women seeking healthcare amid various barriers. The chance to better these women's health options inspires me to continue my studies. After working on health equity in the US, South Africa, Vietnam, and New Zealand, I am eager to begin my MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society at Cambridge to understand the social factors of health and wellbeing in a new cultural context. In my dissertation research, I will explore access to sexual health education for people with disabilities, both in the Cambridge community and internationally. After my time at Cambridge, I intend to attend medical school and practice as a women’s health physician. I am so honored and humbled to join such an outstanding community and learn from my fellow Gates Cambridge peers.

Previous Education

Princeton University Medical Anthropology 2021

I am very grateful to have received a Gates scholarship to start my PhD research in Social Anthropology this year. I will be preparing for fieldwork next year in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). There I will research the niche in trade between Kinshasa (DRC) and Brazzaville (capital of Republic of Congo) over the Congo River, a niche completely dominated by disabled traders. I am specifically interested in how the traders manage to turn their marginalised social position around in this African border zone. I will be looking into how the niche originated, which survival techniques the disabled use to keep it alive, and what the future of the niche will look like. After my PhD I hope to continue research through the international academic community and to use my findings in development cooperation.

Previous Education

United States Naval Academy Oceanography 2009

Hailing from India, I pursued BSc Honors in Chemistry from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, where I recognized the importance of ‘excellence’ and ‘service’. There I got the opportunity to intern at the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) and the University of Cambridge to computationally analyze carbonic anhydrase inhibitors and biomolecules respectively, which opened to me multiple avenues to perform experiments sustainably! To delve deeper, I moved to the University of Oxford to pursue MSc in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, where I am currently working on theory and software development. During my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I will work under the supervision of Prof David Wales and use energy landscape exploration methods to analyze stapled peptides, which possess the potential to be used as novel therapeutics for aberrant protein-protein interactions and in the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular and infectious diseases, etc. Concurrently, I aim to promote science communication between scientists and non-scientists by providing a common platform. I feel blessed to be a part of the passionate Gates Cambridge community as it will empower me to realize my goal of positively impacting global healthcare!

Previous Education

University of Oxford Theoretical Computational Chem 2023
St Stephen's College, University of Delhi Chemistry 2022
Bal Vikas School Physics, Chem, Maths, IP, Eng 2019

My PhD research traces the history of prevention science an interdisciplinary field that emerged in the US during the 1990s in an effort to prevent young people from developing a range of problems later in life. I am interested in the paper practices, institutional infrastructures and trans-disciplinary networks of expertise that gave rise to the production of new kinds of knowledge about youth, risk and the future in the US from roughly the 1960s until the present.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge History and Philosophy of Sci 2015
Columbia University Neuroscience & Comparative Lit 2012

In 2009, I joined the University of Cambridge as MPhil student in Engineering for Sustainable Development. During the year I mainly focused on sustainable applications for the developing world. After the MPhil, I worked as consultant for the UN – International Fund for Agricultural Development as Water Management specialist, working on small-scale irrigation and water development projects in India, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. I re-joined the Centre for Sustainable Development in 2012 as PhD student. My research focuses on resource (i.e. nutrients, water and energy) recovery and reuse in agriculture for low-income countries and from the perspective of business models. The main aim of the research is to understand the environmental/health risks of RR&R and necessary mitigation strategies. The research is part of a joint IWMI/WHO research project.

Galaxies are often admired for their elegance and beauty, but they are also quite fragile. All across the night sky we see galaxies destroying one another, and these processes occur close to home in the small dwarf galaxies which orbit around our Milky Way. Using numerical simulations, I am able to constrain the interaction histories of these galaxies as they are being ripped apart. Streams of stars and gas are spewed from these galaxies during this process, and my goal is to understand the mechanisms responsible for their formation.

I bought my first chant album in the sixth grade as a first-year Latin student. While an undergraduate, my childhood fascination with chant blossomed into an intellectual passion, which now, in turn, has led to the pursuit of a Ph.D. in Music. I am particularly excited about pursuing my interests in chant at Cambridge University because Cambridge is unique in its resources for the interdisciplinary study of chant and its medieval contexts.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania MA, MS, PhD Music/Education 2005
Villanova University MA Classical Studies 2005
College of the Holy Cross BA Music 1998

Growing up in Guatemala and Germany, I have always been fascinated by the interplay of language and technology. My multicultural background led me to study a mixture of political science and economics, as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I became fascinated by the ability of machine learning to model complex cognitive phenomena. As a computer science master’s student at Stanford, I worked together with Dan Jurafsky to build deep learning models to automatically detect and remove bias in news articles. During my PhD in Computer Science, I hope to use insights from how the human brain understands language to improve machine learning and natural language processing models. By leveraging similar mechanisms used in the brain to process language, I believe it is possible to build models that require less data and computation and which can accordingly be more effectively applied to low-resource languages and domains.

My driving interest lies in stemming the spread of preventable disease through improved healthcare delivery and direct patient care. To academically prepare myself for this daunting task I am pairing an American M.D. with a Cambridge PhD in Public Health and Epidemiology, enabling me to understand both the clinical and theoretical aspects of my future work. As part of my PhD, I am working to define the burden of cardiometabolic disease in sub-Saharan Africa and explore possible associations between HIV, ART, and cardiometabolic risk factors in the region. This work took me to Blantyre, Malawi, where I lived for the first year of my PhD designing and implementing a population based cohort study in collaboration with the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust. I have since returned to Cambridge to continue analysis of my data and look towards writing up my dissertation.

Born in Canada and raised in both Vancouver, BC, and Nashville, Tennessee, I’ve seen a wide spectrum of people’s life experiences, which go on to build drastically different world views. These world views dictate societal structures, often overlooking the perspectives of the marginalized. How is this relevant to my studies? I believe that while the artificial intelligence revolution has the potential to greatly improve lives, it also presents a pressing risk: machine learning algorithms may entrench the assumptions and biases of the global elite in systems ranging from gendered job advertising to racially discriminatory loan decisions. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, my extracurricular involvement with Partners in Health Engage and Effective Altruism taught me that even the most well-intentioned plans to improve the world can fail if they aren’t empirically tested in different cultures and contexts. Thus at Cambridge, I’ll be undertaking an MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technologies, with a particular interest in the interpretability of machine learning algorithms, inverse reinforcement learning of human values, and the development of algorithms robust to many contexts. My hope is that soon, algorithms will be able to work alongside humans to make better loan decisions, text analyses, medical diagnoses, and improve lives around the world.

Previous Education

Harvard University