Directory

Through the combination of lived experiences from Afro-diasporic traditions and academic training in Oberlin’s Africana Studies department, I explore Afro-diasporic narratives from an integrated view. As someone of African and Caribbean descent pursuing an MPhil in Social Anthropology, I aim to develop more nuanced ethnographic methods that challenge hegemonic Western norms. Training in anthropological methods, fused with my practice of steelpan, djembe, and Capoeira Angola, will further develop specialized approaches to interrogating how Afro-Diasporic traditions serve as tools for joy, storytelling, and liberation. By investigating the roots of these traditions, my research serves as an acknowledgment to all who have fought to keep Afro-diasporic traditions alive and offers a detailed mapping of revolutionary efforts that respect the intellectualism of diverse populations and forms of expression. Thinking through a diasporic lens requires a global mindset that pushes boundaries and diversifies the range of scholarly views within academia. From both scholarly and practitioner perspectives, I am uniquely positioned to contribute to this diversification on a global scale and to bridge gaps between practitioners and scholars.

Reconciling space for biodiversity conservation with the growing demand for food production is a major global sustainability challenge. As an emerging conservation biologist, I have worked across agroecosystems in India, Peru, and Kenya, developing a strong interest in how human activities and land use shape species distributions and interactions, and how these patterns can guide effective conservation interventions. During my studies at the University of Vermont, I examined the movement ecology of free-ranging domestic dogs in central India to inform mitigation strategies to reduce negative interactions with wildlife. My master’s research at Columbia University, in collaboration with WWF–Peru, investigated livestock predation in the Peruvian Amazon to support coexistence planning with cattle ranchers. I am now interested in designing conservation strategies in agriculture–nature frontiers that safeguard biodiversity while identifying realistic pathways for agricultural production and livelihoods, without unintended trade-offs. At Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Balmford, my PhD will examine how and under what conditions sustainable intensification of livestock systems can deliver durable conservation outcomes

I grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, where I developed a fascination with the diversity of the natural world. Recognising the power of quantitative reasoning in characterising biological systems, I chose to study Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. During my undergraduate studies, research in developmental biology sparked a deep interest in the principles of self-organisation. I became particularly interested in differences between model species, especially how some early developmental processes are highly conserved while others diverge quite dramatically. I pursued this interest through an MPhil at Cambridge, focusing on placental morphogenesis, and subsequently specialised in human reproduction during an MSc in Clinical Embryology at Oxford. In my PhD at Cambridge, I aim to investigate species-specific differences in early mammalian embryogenesis, seeking to understand both what distinguishes humans and what situates us within a broader evolutionary context. I am grateful to be part of the Gates Cambridge community, where I look forward to engaging with the wider ethical and societal implications of my research.

I am a senior in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton University, studying disease dynamics related to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). My family comes from a rural village near Lake Victoria, where the prevalence of sexually transmitted bacterial infections is high. Inspired by this upbringing, I pursued research at Princeton focused on village health inequities, sustainable health systems development, and African foreign policy. Through research experiences in Brazil, India, and Uganda, I've gained a valuable global perspective that will enrich my future research pursuits. I will be studying for a research MPhil in Veterinary Medicine, where I hope to leverage disease modeling to assess the effectiveness of the 4cmenB vaccine in reducing gonorrhea prevalence in low-resource areas. Through this research, I hope to propose cost-effective strategies for limiting AMR incidence in rural East Africa.

I was born and raised in Key West, Florida, with family roots in Uzbekistan. Attending the University of Pennsylvania, I studied biochemistry and biophysics, along with earning my MSE in bioengineering. With an interest in studying autism, I joined the Fuccillo lab, where I investigated the anatomy of striatal interneurons and their contributions to value-based decision-making. Beyond my research, I hope to serve as an educator and advocate for autistic people, centering autistic voices to improve how we talk about autism: from everyday language and diagnostic framing to the broader destigmatization of autism. During my time at Cambridge, I hope to build upon my skills as a scientist and communicator to build our understanding of autism and to translate the work into meaningful improvements for autistic people, like my brother.

As an undergraduate student at Columbia University studying Biomedical Engineering, I developed an interest in applying engineering principles to infectious diseases and merging my passion for science with global health. My undergraduate research has focused on engineering antibodies, both in efforts toward an HIV cure and in inducing a stronger immune response to malaria. Through a PhD in Medical Research at the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research, I aim to build on this foundation and integrate microfluidics, protein engineering, and genomic approaches to develop a more comprehensive malaria vaccine. Existing malaria vaccines target only a single-species and single-stage of the parasite. In my graduate work, I aim to develop a multi-species, multi-stage vaccine candidate that provides more durable and comprehensive protection against malaria. I am truly honored to be a part of the Gates Cambridge community of scholars striving to improve the world in which we live.

As an economist, I want to tell stories about how market systems shape people’s lives and how they can be redesigned to expand fairness and opportunity. I grew up in Pleiku, Vietnam, where my family, like many others, depends on coffee farming. There, farmers sell through middlemen who hold better information about demand, prices and market access, enabling them to capture value at farmers’ expense. I see a similar story in digital markets. Platforms like Amazon act as intermediaries, sitting between consumers and sellers, collecting data and controlling what information is observable to market participants. My PhD will study how platforms’ information design may distort competition and facilitate algorithmic collusion among sellers’ automated pricing agents. This forms part of my commitment to consumer protection. At Cambridge’s Computational Cognitive Economics Lab, I studied how algorithms shape consumer decision-making, and exposure to antitrust case work strengthened my focus on market power in practice. Having benefited from educational opportunities at the LSE, PSE–l'ENS and Cambridge, I want to use economics not simply to describe the world as it is, but to help build one in which information empowers rather than exploits.

For my PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, I will be exploring the connection between the developments of transregional commercial medicine and vernacular medical knowledge in early twentieth century French Indochina and China. This is an extension of my previous research at Oxford on the social and cultural history of the Chinese diasporic community in Vietnam, combined with my experiences as a volunteer translator and community organiser for the Vietnamese migrant community in London, which highlighted the discrepancy between the culturally-inflected language that people in migration use to talk about their health and well-being, and the official clinical language required to navigate healthcare and welfare systems. Supported by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, my research aims to address this gap by investigating the vernacular medical languages developed through transregional activities across China and Vietnam in the twentieth century; while my community work continues to explore ways to facilitate open spaces for migrant communities to express their experiences and concerns in their own vocabulary and languages, whether through workshops, volunteer services, or storytelling.

Raised in a family that valued innovation and tangible impact, I learned early how science can transform lives. From my grandfather’s fields in Italy and my maternal grandparents’ self-sustaining hospital in rural India, I learnt that meaningful change depends on both scientific excellence and a commitment to supporting vulnerable communities: technology must be co-created with the people it aims to serve. Through research and my work with farmers in Kenya, I have become increasingly aware of the urgency of restoring degraded agricultural systems, increasing soil fertility while reducing dependence on fertilisers. I became fascinated by how plants and fungi cooperate to sustain growth, resilience, and soil health. At Cambridge, I will pursue a PhD on SMAX1-mediated control of arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, aiming to identify symbiosis-specific regulators that can help crops form more effective partnerships with beneficial fungi. I am honoured to become part of the Gates community, where I hope to contribute to more regenerative, equitable agriculture, and to a future where science helps both people and ecosystems thrive.

What should an AI system do when the world has changed? This question has shaped my research and my sense of purpose as a computer scientist, since I began my research at Korea University. I studied how AI models, especially language models, handle time-sensitive knowledge, why they become unreliable when facts or regulations change after the training cutoff, and how we can make them respond more responsibly. In my previous work, I developed benchmarks for temporal knowledge and explored how temporal knowledge is represented inside models through mechanistic interpretability, leading me to propose novel alignment method. What distinguishes my research is that I do not treat evaluation, interpretability, and training regimes as separate problems; I aim to connect them into a single framework for building trustworthy AI. In my PhD, I hope to devise time-aware AI agents that can recognize when their knowledge is outdated, retrieve fresh evidence, revise their beliefs, and remain well-calibrated under uncertainty. My long-term goal is to help build AI systems that are not only more capable, but more reliable, transparent, and genuinely useful in improving people’s lives.

Over the course of my studies, my passion for understanding and facilitating development broadened from the level of the individual mind to the systems that constitute and embed it. Through the lens of complexity and information theory, I became convinced that formalising an interdisciplinary language for self-organisation in intelligent systems remains a key issue across the various fields that study cognition. How is cognitive development and function facilitated by adaptive information channeling? This is the question driving my curiosity about intelligent adaptation in natural and artificial systems. As the boundary between analogue and digital intelligence becomes increasingly blurred, I believe that their joint investigation under a shared theoretical language promises a better grip on how we can facilitate their harmonious integration. My PhD therefore is dedicated to aligning neuronal cultures in vitro and spiking neural networks in experimental paradigms, theoretical language and mechanistic constraints. In this way, I hope to contribute to our ability to create synergies with systems of nature and of our own making.

I am from a small, Gulf-side town in northwest Florida, raised by a family of pecan farmers-turned-healthworkers. An early fascination with how people care for one another under hardship, and how stories cultivate empathy, drew me toward anthropology and applied research. During my undergraduate studies, I became deeply involved in immigrant rights movements and focused my research on the experiences of undocumented Latina migrant women navigating exclusionary systems through collective care and advocacy. I then pursued an MA in Human Rights Studies to strengthen my understanding of legal frameworks of rights and justice. This training informed my subsequent career in refugee resettlement and, later, in gender equity and global health within international development. As I begin my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, I aim to advance participatory, decolonialist research that bridges scholarship and practice through exploring how women living at the margins of formal health systems build knowledge, care, and agency in contexts of legal and social precarity. I am endlessly grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust for the opportunity to pursue this work within a community committed to leadership and equity.

As an undergraduate studying Chemistry at Yale University, I developed an interest in spectroscopic analyses of reaction mechanisms, particularly for reactions that relate to the environment and sustainability. After spending four years working as a teacher— as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in South Korea and a mathematics teacher in my hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico— I am excited to pursue a PhD in Chemistry at Cambridge. I look forward to researching iron additive effects on the efficiency of Vanadium Flow Batteries (VFBs), and finding new, sustainable ways to store energy at a large scale. VFBs provide easily scalable energy storage, all while decoupling power and energy production. By utilizing in-line NMR and EPR to analyze the mechanisms by which iron additives stabilize Vanadium cations at high temperatures, we can make VFBs a viable alternative for large-scale renewable energy storage. With this research, I hope to contribute to making renewable energy more accessible to the public and solving the climate crisis.

I am a researcher working at the intersection of AI ethics, democratic theory, and social epistemology. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, my work focused on the epistemic foundations of democracy – particularly how expertise is recognised, contested, and legitimised in an era of information abundance, algorithmic filtering, and political polarisation. While working at the Social Research Centre, I won Australia’s Research Got Talent competition and conducted a mixed-methods research project investigating misinformation susceptibility among Australian men. I am now working with the Museum of Sticks & Stones to translate these findings into targeted media literacy initiatives aimed at strengthening digital resilience in Australia. I am delighted to be commencing an MPhil in Ethics of AI, Data, and Algorithms at the University of Cambridge, where I hope to integrate philosophical analysis with real-world policy challenges related to truth, trust, and algorithms in democratic societies.

Fascinated by the big questions of the universe’s earliest moments, evolution, and composition, I studied Astrophysics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. Working on commissioning observatories across wavelengths, I became interested in innovative telescope and experiment designs. Continuing this research, I seek to advance the frontier of our technological capabilities and unlock new physical understanding. I hope to explore one of the great unknowns: the Cosmic Dark Ages before the first stars formed, when the universe was filled with cold, neutral hydrogen. This era left behind a record of the cosmos' first light in the form of an extraordinarily faint radio signal. Detecting it is challenging, as it is overwhelmed by foreground emission from our galaxy, distorted by Earth’s atmosphere, and further obstructed by human-made interference. My Physics PhD at Cavendish Laboratory will focus on developing the instrumentation and analysis methods for a mission going to the far side of the Moon to detect this primordial signal and revolutionize what we know about our cosmic origins.

I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned early that the media can either amplify voices or erase them. That question — who gets to speak, and who gets heard — has shaped everything I've done since.As an MPhil student in Modern South Asian Studies at Cambridge, I am investigating how colonial structures, including inherited laws, concentrated ownership, and knowledge hierarchies, continue to shape Pakistan's media governance. I call this the "coloniality of media," and my work is about decolonizing media governance. I aim to uncover how these structures operate and document the alternatives already thriving outside this logic: community radio, vernacular platforms, networks that refuse to wait for permission.Underpinning my research is a conviction: diagnosis without action is incomplete. I believe that a media landscape rooted in equity and local knowledge is not just possible; it is necessary.I am honored to join a community of scholars who believe that where you come from should never determine how far you can go, and that knowledge, ultimately, is meant to serve.

My journey began in Sub-Saharan Africa, shaped by my upbringing in Botswana and my roots in Zambia. After graduating from Privolzhsky Research Medical University in Russia, I practised as a clinician across both countries, where my interest in paediatrics deepened. During this time, I came to recognise that many challenges in children’s care are rooted in system design rather than clinical complexity alone. To explore this further, I pursued a Master’s in Medical Sciences by Research at the University of Edinburgh as a Beit Trust Scholar, before gaining experience as a human factors researcher. This led me to join the International Health Systems Group at the University of Cambridge as an academic collaborator. I am now excited to begin a new phase of my journey, focusing on redesigning paediatric surgical services for neurodivergent children. My research aims to develop scalable, context-sensitive approaches that improve health outcomes, safety, and quality of care globally. Beyond my academic and clinical work, I co-founded Bupalo Children’s Centre to support access to care for children with special needs. I am also a musician and singer-songwriter, and I enjoy sharing my music with the world.

Growing up as a Wiradjuri and Wemba Wemba man on Bunurong Country in Victoria, Australia, I witnessed the gap between how health systems serve Indigenous peoples and how Indigenous communities understand our own wellbeing. This disconnect drew me to psychology, where I completed my Honours at the University of Melbourne and began investigating how cultural practices can heal mental health, not merely as adjuncts to Western clinical models. This led to publications in The Lancet Psychiatry and the Medical Journal of Australia on Indigenous knowledges and evidence-based practice.I currently work within Melbourne University's Medical School to embed culturally safe frameworks into medical education, shaping how future doctors understand and respond to Indigenous health. At Cambridge, my MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society will extend this work, examining how health knowledge is produced and what genuine culturally safe care looks like, with a focus on comparative Indigenous health governance.I then intend to pursue clinical training in psychology and research as an Indigenous clinician-academic to ensure future psychologists and doctors are equipped to deliver care that honours Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.