Directory

I am pretty much a journeyman: born in Surabaya, spent my childhood in Madiun, grew up in Batam, completed my high school in Singapore, and studied BSc (Hons) Biomedical Genetics in Newcastle. Along the way, my curiosity for many things has been growing, ever since my parents encouraged me to read a lot: from national newspaper, Tintin series, to literature.During my undergraduate years, I developed strong interest in molecular biology. I was the first Indonesian to be selected by the Amgen Scholars Programme in Cambridge, to pursue a summer research on CRISPR/Cas9 modification. My undergraduate project at Newcastle University, where I managed to define novel interactions between two synaptonemal complex proteins, motivated me even more to embark on a research career.I will work with Dr. Luca Pellegrini at the Department of Biochemistry to investigate the molecular machinery of eukaryotic DNA replication. This may help us to give much-needed details on the fundamental process of genomic duplication and clues on how some genetic diseases arise.I am striving to be a leading scientist who is well-motivated to help the others. My biggest goal is to help my home nation Indonesia. It is a huge country with so many potentials – and I hope to lead and to contribute in the field of medical research.

Previous Education

University of Newcastle Upon Tyne

It is my hope—also conviction—that historical research can provide insights into how we make sense of our world today. To study History is also to appreciate the weight of truth. Most importantly, I hope my research can be part of a collective effort which helps people from my home, Hong Kong, weather stormy times and imagine their manifold futures. My undergraduate dissertation at HKU explores the city’s turbulent 1950s, not least the way upheavals at the time were written and remembered. As I began my MPhil at Cambridge, I decided to build upon such research to explore similar convulsions in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1950s. My dissertation fleshes out their connected histories and examines the way Hong Kong and Singapore figured side by side from and beyond the British perspective. I am interested in how the movement of people, objects, and ideas drew the two colonies together. My PhD research will adopt a larger time frame to probe how people in both colonies came to terms with moments of radical change. It also hopes to further explore how ideological currents—from nationalism to the language of human rights, multiculturalism to the cause of democracy—cut across boundaries and pervaded Hong Kong, Singapore, and beyond.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MPhil in World History 2021
University of Hong Kong History & English Studies 2020

Most have a favourite colour, I have a favourite cell. Macrophages are tissue-resident immune cells that are the ‘first ones in and last ones out’ in most tissue insults. This crush started in 2018, while investigating a rare immune disorder where chronic EBV infection drove uncontrolled macrophage activation, corrupting our biggest ally into a fatal enemy. I went on to study these cells in other contexts, including pregnancy, where placental macrophages have a plethora of roles essential for fetal health. By the midpoint of my medical studies at Cambridge University, I was committed to dedicating more time to immunology research, which has the potential to transform all fields of medicine. For my PhD, I bring my interests in tissue-resident immunity to triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). TNBC is the most aggressive form of breast cancer and the lack of effective therapies in TNBC is a major unmet clinical need. By combining computational methods with functional disease models, I hope to derive translatable insights to antibody and macrophage-directed responses within tumours, which may yield novel therapeutic strategies in TNBC. Outside of the lab, I am passionate about sports, education outreach and medical education.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Medicine 2020

Having studied History as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, I strongly believe that knowledge of the past is key to building a better tomorrow. History bridges the gaps of time, space and culture to expose the complexities and contradictions of human nature, teaching us valuable and relevant lessons about ourselves and our world. It is my belief that an MPhil in World History at Cambridge will not only deepen my exposure to global historical diversity, but will also allow me to become an agent in championing and spreading such diversity. A Singaporean by birth, I hope in my postgraduate dissertation to explore the myriad social, political and cultural representations of Peranakan women, a unique ethnic group at the crossroads of Chinese and Malay cultures that has often been ignored and downplayed in the existing historiography. It is my hope that my research will not only empower women as social and historical agents, but also preserve and shed new light on modern Singapore's rapidly vanishing heritage. Indeed it is because of my desire to make a difference that I am honoured to be joining the Gates Cambridge family, an international community that constantly strives to better the world we live in.

Previous Education

Oxford University

A lovely place to learn about mice and men and the dissection of both.

My two obsessions are ethnography and queer joy. I am trained in sociology, where I cultivate my imagination of a better world. I seek to advance public health by letting lived experience enrich knowledge production. Amid the myths and moral judgements surrounding suicide, I am curious about how survivors of suicide loss in the queer community make sense of their loss. Suicide prevention research is universally important and I am hopeful that the networks and training that I will get in Cambridge will strengthen collective attempts at fostering health, justice, and dignity for all. Committed to dismantling stigma, I guide my peers in mental health literacy and professional help-seeking, support survivors of sexual violence, and befriend homeless people. The stigmatised communities I have worked with for six years cultivated my ethos of sensitivity and trauma-informed care. Community-building is important to me, I hope to connect with fellow first-generation university students and poetry lovers.

Previous Education

National University of Singapore Sociology

Upon completing my degree in Psychology, I made my first foray into psychiatry by working as a research assistant to at Singapore's National Neuroscience Institute. While administering neuropsychological assessments for dementia patients, I became fascinated by the global challenge to halt the disease. I decided that fighting against neurodegenerative disorders would be my life endeavor. With a MRI research fellowship at University at Buffalo’s Neuroimaging Analysis Center, I am investigating the neural correlates of cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease. It is just so exciting to be part of a respected team at Cambridge, where I aim to improve early and accurate diagnosis of dementia subtypes. Through the utilization of mulitmodal neuroimaging techniques, I will be working with Professor John O'Brien to identify distinctive and signature patterns of cerebral abnormalities associated with specific dementia subtypes.

I am interested in the urgency and usefulness of "island cinema" as an aesthetic and political category that can be applied to readings of Southeast Asian films, focusing on works by independent filmmakers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. By privileging "island" as a critical category, I want to investigate how this more eco- and geo-conscious approach can expand academic discourse on Southeast Asian films as they pertain to decoloniality, marginalities and the non-human. I've worked as a film journalist and critic, with work published in Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, The Telegraph, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound, Forbes.com and NME. I am a member of FIPRESCI and was a Golden Globes voter from 2022-2024. I've worked as a programmer for the Singapore International Film Festival and served on the critics’ jury at the Venice Film Festival 2022. Outside of film, I am passionate about sports and have been part of Singapore's national cricket and football teams. In 2023, I represented Singapore in cricket at the Southeast Asian Games held in Cambodia.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies and English 2020

I'm glad to have the opportunity to study at Cambridge. I'm going to be studying for an M.Phil in Finance at the Judge Institute. Over the next year, I hope to further improve my understanding of finance and the financial markets, meet a lot of interesting people and enjoy the entire Cambridge experience.

My research topic at Cambridge is on the aerodynamics involved in the flight of dragonflies. Specifically, I will be studying the fluid structural formations and interactions which lead to the high lift performance of dragonfly wings. This, however, would have been impossible without the necessary support, so many thanks to the Trust!

I started dabbling in science and research from 11, and won an award that year for my invention to aid the daily lives of people with rheumatoid arthritis. At 18 I won the Merit prize in the Singapore National Science Talent Search based on a biochemistry project investigating a particular enzyme in the venom of the poisonous Malaysian krait (Bungarus candidus). For my PhD I intend to work on stem cells and development, which complements with my clinical goal of becoming an obstetrician and gynaecologist – I wish to look at the developmental basis of subfertility and help couples everywhere bring their own little bundles of joy into the world.

Born and raised in the suburbs of Toronto, I am currently a senior studying Engineering Science at the University of Toronto who is passionate about sustainable energy and climate change. Over the past year, I have been studying how hydrocarbons flow in nanochannels to assess the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. In addition, I have spent my undergraduate summers performing research in various labs around the world including nanoengineering at the National University of Singapore, solar cell design at the University of Toronto, and theoretical geophysics at the University of Cambridge. With growing concerns of global climate change, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is going to play a key role in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Bearing this in mind, I plan to pursue a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics focusing on the fluid dynamics of carbon dioxide sequestration in deep saline aquifers. Specifically, I will be looking at the effects of spatial heterogeneities on the long-term safety and storage of carbon dioxide underground. I am very excited to be entering the rich and diverse community of Gates scholars this coming fall. Interests: basketball, martial arts, arts and crafts, and foosball

Previous Education

University of Toronto

Having always been fascinated by the history of science and how scientific descriptions can be quite counter-intuitive, I decided to major in Physics. However, I soon realised that the issues I was interested in were being asked instead in the Humanities and Social Sciences instead. As a result, I shifted focus to the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). As a Master's student at Cambridge HPS, I studied various colonial-era surveyors in Scotland and British India. Drawing on the history of colonialism, the sociology of science, and cartography, I studied the range of of methods deployed to secure credibility by agents far away from metropolitan centres. I currently work as Research Associate in Singapore, where I use the tools and approaches learnt at Cambridge to study the growth of genomics and state surveillance in South and South East Asia.

I came from Ipoh, a small mining town in Malaysia. My father passed away from lung cancer having never smoked in his entire life. His passing motivated me to explore whether certain diseases are caused by urban environmental factors or bad genetics. My experience of delivering food to the single-living, less-abled elderlies during COVID-19 made me realise that many people in Singapore faced similar health difficulties too. This series of events made me question if we could change the way we live, and perform preventive measures to address factors affecting our health outcomes. At the University of Cambridge, I will pursue the MPhil in Human-inspired Artificial Intelligence. My research will create the foundational tools to describe the relationships between urban elements and humans and provide the data infrastructure to investigate causal inference between urban exposures and health outcomes. With the Gates-Cambridge scholarship, I now have the opportunity to make an impact on public health and create a way where we all can live a healthy and prosperous life.

Previous Education

Nanyang Technological University Mechanical Engineering

Previous Education

University of Delhi BA Economics 2001

After a childhood in Arizona's biodiverse Sonoran desert and later Düsseldorf, Germany, I studied Zoology at University College Cork in Ireland, including an exchange at National University of Singapore. For the past several years, I have been working across Latin America in community-based conservation. Experiencing the conflicts plaguing tropical forests provoked my desire to solve a critical problem: while demand for agricultural land threatens biodiversity, production is essential to livelihoods. With Dr. Edgar Turner, I will focus on conservation and income stability in smallholder oil palm plantations, evaluating management methods’ effects on biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and profit. The research aims to improve understanding of oil palm ecology, smallholder economic relations, and other core ecological and sociological principles. With educated management, I believe biodiversity conservation has potential to ameliorate poverty and foster improvement for a range of pressing concerns. I am truly honoured to be part of The Gates Cambridge Trust, which provides an unparalleled foundation and community for positive global change.

Previous Education

University College Cork Bachelors of Science in Zoology 2017

I was born in Singapore in 1988 and was raised in Sydney, Australia. From 2007–2010, I undertook a BSc. (Adv) Hons. at the University of Sydney, Australia, for which I was awarded first class honours and the University Medal in Physical/Organic Chemistry. In 2012 I obtained an MSc. in polymer chemistry from Sydney University under the supervision of Professors Sebastien Perrier and Maxwell J. Crossley. From 2013 to 2016, I was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to undertake PhD studies under Professor Jonathan Nitschke at the University of Cambridge. My PhD thesis explored the covalent post-assembly modification of metallosupramolecular architectures.

From February 2017-2019, I undertook a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Stevens Group at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. My work focused on the preparation of stimuli-responsive synthetic biomaterials for accelerating the healing of chronic skin wounds.

From June 2019, I will join the faculty at the University of Sydney's school of chemistry as a Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellow, funded by the Australian Research Council. My work will focus on stimuli-responsive self-assembled polymers.

Previous Education

University of Sydney MSc., Polymer Chemistry 2012
University of Sydney BSc. Adv (Hons 1M), Physical–Organic Chemistry 2010

Across the world, alternative political communities fight to represent the masses, ranging from that of alternative political parties, NGOs, to protesters that gather in the city. Through studying, conducting research, and teaching at the National University of Singapore, I have explored this at various urban scales, with the goal of illuminating political inequalities embedded in the city. I further pursued this goal as an MPhil student at the University of Cambridge, which deepened my understanding of these issues beyond Singaporean shores. Concurrently, I have also been involved in events designed to bring related theories into the everyday context. My proposed PhD study aims to explore the urban spatialities of diasporic communities in the UK, examining the social spaces required for political expression and relevant other issues such as social integration. I hope for my research to be a platform documenting the complexity of their stories, in so broadening traditional conceptions of migratory urbanisms. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to continue my education at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, and will continue developing my capacity as a leader and researcher who can meaningfully impact the community around me.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Architecture and Urban Studies 2022
National University of Singapore Architecture 2021