Directory

I am a biological anthropologist interested in the evolutionary context of chronic disease and the biosocial relationships between grandmothers, mothers, and children.

Currently working towards a PhD in Pathology.

I have always been driven by scientific curiosity. Cambridge has the resources to allow me to carry out science for the sake of science with no direct industrial application. My focus is the crystal structure of nanoparticles and in determining and explaining the mechanism by which crystalline nanoparticles form. I'm using the opportunity of being based in the UK to gain international experience and to meet experts before returning to South Africa to work in a university there on nanoscience.

Previous Education

Cornell University BS (HONS) Biological Sciences

Links

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

For me, one of the most interesting and exciting things in life is learning how different people view themselves. Within my field, I will study the interrelationship of knowledge, learning and cultural identity; also, the role of individuals in shaping personal and collective self-awareness. From there, I hope to extend my study forward into the ways that innovations in knowledge transmission and application continue to shape ever-changing concepts of individual and group identity.

Growing up in Clearwater Florida, I graduated from Harvard College in May 2014 with a degree in Chemistry. Throughout my time as an undergraduate, I was amazed by the power of organic chemistry to influence medicine. I focused my senior thesis on the activity of covalent modifiers, molecules whose unique chemical reactivity affords them a desirable biological effect. At Cambridge, I pursued an MPhil in Chemistry under the supervision of Gonçalo Bernardes, a Research Associate at Peterhouse College. My research at Cambridge focused on the chemistry used to modify proteins and develop targeted therapies, like antibody-drug conjugates, for the treatment of a variety of cancers. I am currently pursuing an M.D. Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, continuing my exploration of the intersection of chemistry and medicine. I hope to one day unite these disciplines to both help develop innovative therapeutics and uncover new insights regarding disease biology.

Through inefficient and inequitable resource use, society has pushed natural systems beyond their planetary boundaries, such that our own well-being is being undermined. This idea roused my curiosity during my BSc in Environmental Sciences, and the need for a better understanding of the complex relationship between environmental and human health has motivated much of my academic career. While completing my MSc in Geography at Western University, Canada, I traveled to Uganda as part of a Global Health Systems program. This experience was perspective-building; reinforcing the idea that the most under-privileged and impoverished in our global village are the most vulnerable to harm associated with environmental degradation. In Uganda, I worked with communities to address environmental and social issues and facilitated a partnership with a local women’s handcraft group forming a Not-for-Profit organization that aims to support the entrepreneurship of women through the sale of the group’s handwork. My PhD in Plant Sciences will further develop the understanding of the risks human activity poses to ecosystem stability by exploring the link between forestry management practices and the protection of aquatic ecosystems. The broader aim is to ensure that resources are being managed efficiently so that human well-being is not compromised. I am honoured to join the Gates Cambridge Community, a community not only interested in intellectual progress, but in the betterment of humanity.

Previous Education

University of Western Ontario

Since 2013, Assistant Professor in Classical Greek at DLCV-FFLCH/Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. As a Gates scholar, she received a Ph.D. in Divinity from the University of Cambridge in 2012. She also holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, USP, Brazil (2007). She has been awarded visiting fellowship from DFG research projects in Erfurt, Tübingen and Frankfurt, and also received pos-doc support from the British School at Rome, the Fondation Hardt and FAPESP. After being a Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College for almost ten years, she was awarded Visiting Fellowships for the last two years from Lucy Cavendish and for two years Visiting Fellow at Lucy Cavendish. Her research focuses on the Roman East in Late Antiquity, and on the transmission of Greek, Syriac, Ge'ez and Latin sources. Her current projects concern Christological polemical works, synodical and senatorial proceedings, acclamations and the construction of imperial authority. Other research interests are imperial and Byzantine hexametric poetry and education, and the medieval reception of classical and late-antique philosophy and theology in Greek, Syriac, Arab and Latin.

As an MIT undergraduate in geoscience, I have travelled to different corners of the world to conduct geologic fieldwork. These experiences have made plain to me the need for policies that protect those most vulnerable to environmental change. I remember, for instance, the lingering damage from a devastating El Niño that brought unprecedented flooding to my Peruvian host town. I recall the vulnerability of small Andean villages nestled in the shadows of active volcanoes. Resolving the consequences of environmental catastrophe is no longer a question of science, but a question of society. We don’t lack scientific skills— we lack people skills. This is the gap I want to fill in my academic work and future career: I want to leverage the relationship between science and policy to make a visible, discernible impact on the Earth, particularly considering the urgency of our modern climate crisis. At Cambridge, I seek an education in the economic and political dimensions of environmental regulation, one which will equip me with the tools to harness the promise of scientific advancement. With the necessary political, legal, and economic context, I will escort trusted Earth science out of the realm of the laboratory and into the real world.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Geoscience

I have long been fascinated with the question of how societies achieve economic progress and how they determine the distribution of their resources. Volunteering for a year in Thailand after high school underscored to me how economic, political, and social inequalities are closely intertwined. I was able to delve into these topics as an undergraduate reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. I found economics to be a fascinating and useful perspective, because it enables us to interrogate socially important questions in a systematic and tractable way, and pursued these methods further in my Master's degree. As a PhD student, my objective is to research the Macroeconomics of Inequality: I want to analyse, firstly, what the distributive effects of fiscal and monetary policies are and whether we can employ them to help ensure a more equal distribution of resources without sacrificing growth. Secondly, I wish to investigate the extent to which changes in economic inequality over the past few decades shape recent phenomena such as slowing global growth. Through this research, I hope to contribute to the development of a macroeconomic perspective on the relationship between equality and efficiency. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to research questions that to me seem profoundly important in times of high inequality and concerns about future prosperity, and I am thrilled to become part of the Gates Cambridge community!

Previous Education

University of Oxford

Links

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

Following my graduation from Georgetown, I have worked as a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Berlin, earned an MSc in Criminology from Oxford, and served as Program Coordinator for the Prison Education Project at Washington University in St. Louis. The two pillars of my professional life are education and criminal justice research. My core academic interest is the changing role of judicial discretion at sentencing. The recent proliferation of sentencing grids, narrative guidelines, and risk-assessment algorithms has made sentences more predictable and consistent, but this shift has also diminished judges’ abilities to engage with the individual characteristics of the people being sentenced. My studies and work experience have shown me that rigid approaches to sentencing can leave people doubting procedural and outcome fairness. Adopting the view that sentencing is morally complex and not always amenable to rote procedure, I will study the progression away from human judicial discretion and seek a framework to identify when it has gone too far. In the end, my research will prove useful to policymakers and practitioners attempting to craft sentencing systems in their own jurisdictions.

Previous Education

University of Oxford Criminology 2025
Georgetown University Psychology 2023

My PhD dissertation is a behavioural study that draws from reading-, memory- and language proficiency research to explore the relationship between lexical representations’ quality, limited processing resources and mechanisms of selective attention and cognitive control in reading comprehension.

I studied English literature at McGill University, graduated in 2011, and spent last year teaching English in the south of Spain. Following earlier flings with journalism and arts administration, my ambition turned to academia—and to a fascination with evocations of, and meditations on, the past in twentieth-century literature. At Cambridge I will complete an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature and write a dissertation on the intersection of fiction and history in the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald and W. G. Sebald. The imagined past takes one back to a basic impulse of fiction and forward to the fate of the novel in contemporary writing: with the support of the Trust, I aim for a not dissimilar combination of teaching and writing, the study and the practice of the ways in which people deal with unquiet histories.

Links

Https://Digitalisventures.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-friedlander-61098620

I graduated from Rutgers University with a double major in Biomedical Engineering and Ecology. A native of Cranford, New Jersey, my wanderlust has led me to spend a year traveling the world and in so doing, witness a startling degree of poverty. I am now an active member of Engineers Without Borders, through which I have established a project to bring pure water to people in northern Thailand. As informed by my major in ecology, I believe that the world’s deteriorating environmental conditions disproportionately affect the poor. I intend to devote my career toward improving global health. I will spend my graduate studies creating a low cost, high precision lab-on-a-chip that can be used to detect disease in remote, resource-poor settings. At Cambridge, I will design biosensors that can be used in such platforms.

I graduated from Grand Valley State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Film and Video while minoring in African/African American Studies. I continued my education by earning a Master of Arts from the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, where the study of filmmaking on the African continent became my focus. When conducting research on filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo, I learned about international omnibus films, or anthology works which feature contributions from directors around the world. At Cambridge, I look forward to crafting a thesis dedicated to omnibus segments produced by filmmakers from African countries and the nature of being asked to represent a nation or perhaps even an entire continent. My goal is to reevaluate the omnibus voice as a space where filmmakers speak alongside one another, challenging the academic perception of a homogeneous, African film language. Finally, I would not be a Gates Cambridge Scholar without the help of faculty references. I thank Dr. Faye Ginsburg, Dr. Manthia Diawara, and Dr. Marina Hassapopoulou for supporting my applications to the PhD in Film and Screen Studies course and the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Previous Education

Grand Valley State University Film and Video
New York University Cinema Studies

I grew up on a farm in Iowa with my parents, younger brother, and plenty of animals - pets and otherwise. In high school I became interested in medicine, and this interest has since expanded to include research. After finishing undergraduate work in 2004, I began studying neurodegeneration in Iowa City and St. Louis, and I am quite excited to have the opportunity to continue studying this topic at Cambridge. Next fall I plan to return to St. Louis to pursue an MD/PhD at Washington University.

Before coming to Cambridge, I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Biomedicine at the University of Würzburg in northern Bavaria. Tasting different areas of research, the possibility to observe life at its smallest unit by using high-end microscopy of single living cells fascinated me the most. During my PhD in Oncology, I want to understand how the barriers that prevent a normal cell from becoming a tumour cell are overcome. Under the supervision of Prof. Venkitaraman and Dr. Esposito at the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre, I will therefore contribute to the development of novel microscopy systems that allow us to draw a quantitative network map of the soon-to-be cancer cell at a so far unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. This map will help us to identify the nodes in the network we have to hit by therapeutic means to prevent and cure cancer. Despite science, my main interest lies in politics with a special focus on sustainable development on a local and global level.