Directory

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

I grew up surrounded by the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I completed a degree in Earth & Planetary Sciences and began researching the effects of climate change on vulnerable landscapes like those in my hometown. I am particularly interested in developing and implementing modeling tools to answer important questions about how forests around the world will respond to a warmer and drier world. As a PhD candidate in the Plant Sciences department at Cambridge, I will use vegetation models to understand the effects of climate change and logging on tropical forests. It is crucial to preserve tropical forests which host incredible biodiversity and provide one of Earth’s most important carbon sinks while also finding ways to meet our timber needs. As part of my research, I hope to work closely with industry leaders and policymakers to develop actionable solutions.

Previous Education

Harvard University Earth and Planetary Sciences 2025

Growing up in North Carolina and visiting my family’s small farm in India, I witnessed how disasters driven by climate change, such as drought, flooding, and hurricanes, can devastate communities. I grew interested in understanding both the science behind climate change and the incentives that shape decisions around climate change, leading me to study two disciplines at Harvard: Environmental Science & Engineering and Economics. Through research on climate change’s impacts on agriculture, leading the Harvard Undergraduate Clean Energy Group, and working on cement decarbonization at the Rocky Mountain Institute, I explored creative ways that scientists, policymakers, and businesspeople can work together to make sustainable innovations easier to access. At Cambridge, I plan to study industrial policies that accelerate green manufacturing innovation and support emerging clean technology markets.I am truly honored to be a part of the Gates-Cambridge community, and I’m excited to engage with a diverse cohort of scholars working across disciplines!

Previous Education

Harvard University Environmental Science & Engineering 2026
Harvard University Economics 2026

I am a Tibetan-American who grew up between New Haven, Connecticut, and the Hunsur Tibetan Refugee Settlement in India. Growing up across these settings shaped my interest in migration, resettlement, and the public institutions that structure life for migrants and refugees.​ Public health is my North Star. It has guided my undergraduate training at Yale University and my work as an advocate and researcher across local health systems, national institutions, and humanitarian contexts in the Americas, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. My work has included shaping refugee health policy, producing population-level health evidence, and evaluating humanitarian and asylum health practices at scale.​ At a time when displacement is both increasingly widespread and long term, my MPhil in Population Health Sciences at Cambridge will contribute to scholarship that informs future responses to refugee situations. I will examine refugee and migrant health outcomes across the life course, with the aim of advancing durable, evidence-driven approaches to humanitarian operations, health governance, and resettlement policy. I am excited to join the Gates Cambridge community in tackling global challenges and empowering marginalized communities.

Previous Education

Yale University Global Public Health 2026

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tenzinrdhondup

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

I did my undergraduate in Chemistry at Oxford where my undergraduate research project focused on developing new proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) techniques for measuring cardiac creatine content in order to better understand heart failure. I am currently working at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre with Dr. Chris Rodgers developing parallel transmit techniques for ultra-high field (7T) MRIs.

Previous Education

University of Oxford

My research focuses on Calcium signalling, a fundamental process that controls many cellular functions as diverse as contraction, secretion, fertilization, division, development, apoptosis, memory and learning. The Gates Trust offers me not only the funding, but also the chance to meet other highly motivated Gates scholars. I will take advantage of this opportunity to build my skills and network so that I can pursue my goals further.

My PhD research at Cambridge integrated genetic and behavioural studies to address questions related to the function and evolution of song in Neotropical birds. One aim of my research was to understand the function of avian duets, joint acoustic displays between a mated pair of birds. The second aim of my research was to explore the role of learned songs in the process of speciation. The unifying goal is to increase our understanding of the processes that generate and maintain biological diversity, particularly in tropical ecosystems. I am a member of the Yanayacu Natural History Research Group in Ecuador whose aim is to describe the natural histories of little-known tropical species in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of tropical ecology, evolutionary biology, and the diversity of organisms that share our planet.

I graduated with distinction in Chemistry from Delhi University and did my Post graduation in Environmental Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. At Cambridge, I aim to study whether environmental change was indeed the reason for the collapse of Harappan Civilization by reconstructing the paleoclimatic history of the region. My research at Cambridge should shed light on the nature of the patterns interrelating climate and civilizational activities.