Directory

I grew up in rural Ghana without running water and electricity, and experienced first-hand the health inequities that plague such underserved communities, especially in times of pandemics like COVID-19. These experiences led me to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies in Biology, and NonProfit Leadership, respectively, at the University of Pennsylvania, and later, an MPH at Yale. Over the past four years, I have been working with my colleagues at Cocoa360, a global health nonprofit I founded, to leverage community resources such as cocoa to improve social determinants of health such as healthcare and educational access. Building on our work thus far, my PhD research will address questions pertaining to the impact of using community engagement and farm revenues to eliminate low cost barriers such as health insurance premiums and user fees, on health outcomes and healthcare services utilization. Findings will guide the rigorous scale of our model across Ghana, and further inform the development of similar universal health financing interventions to improve health outcomes around the world.

Previous Education

Yale University Public Health 2020
University of Pennsylvania NonProfit Leadership 2019
University of Pennsylvania Biology 2015

Throughout the years, I have been driven to align my passion for the environment by becoming an environmental engineer. At the same time, I start to realize that I need to be equipped with a holistic view of the context engineering fits into and a multidisciplinary approach to solve problems faced by industry and society. Through the MPhil program in Engineering for Sustainable Development, I hope to learn sustainability concepts and strategies to practically implement these concepts into engineering design and projects. I also strive to recognize the complexity of inter-relating environmental, social, institutional and economic factors as well as the uncertainties associated with them. Without seeing “the big picture”, engineers are confined in their technical domain, and as a result, their engineering products are often isolated from their context. As I advance in my career, I want to lead changes towards environmentally and socially proactive engineering practices.

My goal as an aspiring physician-scientist is to harness the advances of scientific research to prevent and treat human disease. As an undergraduate at the University of Scranton, I became fascinated with the human body and, in particular, the idea of manipulating tissue-resident stem cells to aid in organ regeneration. At the National Institutes of Health, I was able to investigate several regenerative processes in the bone marrow, including blood and vascular regeneration. During my PhD training, I plan to study a different population in the bone marrow—the skeletal stem cell. Through identification and characterization of the pure skeletal stem cell and its interaction with neighboring cell populations, my hope is to improve stem cell therapies for skeletal disease. Outside of the lab, I will also continue to compete in the sport of powerlifting, and to partner with healthcare teams that provide medical services to the poor and underserved. I am sincerely grateful to be part of the Gates Scholar community and to work with this unique and vibrant community to improve global society.

Previous Education

Medical University of South Carolina MD/PhDMedicine 2025
University of Scranton MD/PhD Medicine 2015

I grew up in Dunedin, New Zealand, where I later studied a BA in Classical Studies and Anthropology, and a BA Hons and MA in Anthropology at Otago University. My work explores the deep human history of the Indo-Pacific islands and long term changes to society, technology, and subsistence. My research around New Guinea has focussed on 1) the production and exchange of material culture by Austronesian-speaking communities around the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea; 2) Pleistocene-Holocene settlement, agriculture, and trade around the New Guinea Highlands; and, most recently as the subject of my PhD research, 3) human adaptation to small rainforested islands in eastern Wallacea and northwest New Guinea. Prior to beginning my PhD I was employed as Research Coordinator at Southern Pacific Archaeological Research where I examined stone tool industries around southern Aotearoa, early European settler urbanisation and industry, and the first Chinese settlement of New Zealand in the late nineteenth century.

Previous Education

University of Otago

Born and grown up in Montreal, Canada, I completed a Bachelor’s degree (BSc) and a Master’s degree (MSc) in economics at the University of Montreal. Passionate of international development, I then completed a second Master’s degree (MPhil) in Development Studies at the University of Oxford, focusing my research on microfinance and housing microfinance. I intend to pursue my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in economics. More precisely, I intend to use the tools of microeconomics (notably network economics, institutional economics and identity economics) in the building of a theoretical model applied to the study of the construction of information networks and their implications for sociological and institutional change, notably in terms of social norms and identity.

As a human rights lawyer focused on SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity, expression and sex characteristics), race and gender, I am invariably interested in the ways in which law, society and these identity categories intersect. My time working on LGBTQIA+ legal and social advocacy in Kenya, where same sex relations still carry a 14-year penalty, and my academic exploration of sexual violence against queer women in South Africa during my LLM at Leiden University, brought to the fore the urgent need for multi-faceted strategies in tackling complex socio-legal challenges. Accordingly, my doctoral research applies a transdisciplinary approach to examine how, why, and with what impact Black lesbian bisexual and queer womxn mobilize law to protect their rights and advance social change in Kenya and South Africa. By studying how we translate ideas of political and personal identity, human rights, social advocacy and legal mobilization into specific strategies, I hope to expatiate intersectionality as lens, epistemology, method, and action. In particular, how individuals at the nexus of intersecting vulnerabilities navigate systems of oppression at the practical level and articulate their demands both before the law and society.

Previous Education

Black Europe Summer School Citizenship, Race & Ethnicity 2021
Rijksuniversiteit Leiden (Leiden Univ) Human Rights Law 2020

While completing my B.S. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, I had the opportunity to work on a variety of research projects spanning the fields of computational genomics, viral pathogenesis, immunology, and neuroscience. After graduation, I entered medical school as a student in the Johns Hopkins Medical Scientist Training Program, where I continued to expand my interests in infectious and immune-mediated disorders of the central nervous system. During my PhD in Clinical Neurosciences, I will undertake a collaborative project between the NIH and Cambridge focusing on using remyelination biology and spatiotemporal modeling of multiple sclerosis lesion development to create a method for effectively assessing myelin protection and regeneration. Additionally, I will seek to investigate the underlying processes, including those involving environmental, infectious, and autoimmune factors, that contribute to neuroinflammatory pathology and subsequent demyelination and neurodegeneration. I am honored to be a Gates Scholar and am eager to use my training to pursue a career as a physician-scientist that combines clinical medicine, translational research, and teaching.

Previous Education

Johns Hopkins University Medicine 2027
Yale University Mol., Cell. & Dev. Biology 2019
University of Cambridge Study Abroad 2017

Links

https://sites.google.com/site/ramongalinanes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramon-galinanes-jr-ph-d-7927204

Part-time PhD candidate in Economic and Environmental History at the University of Cambridge. I am also Head of Content at international law firm Slaughter and May.

Previous Education

Di Tella University Lic. in History 2010

I was born and raised in the Santa Monica Mountains, just north of Los Angeles, California. Growing up there, the chaparral and oak forests offered an impeccable education in the processes of the natural world. Above all, it left me deeply interested in the relationships between human beings and ecosystems—an interest that led me to archaeology. Unfortunately, American archaeology has a long tradition of perpetuating Manifest Destiny in the creation and control of Native American history and identity—leaving a legacy of intergenerational trauma tied to the field. Coming from a Native family, these issues aren’t simply theoretical but lived experiences. At the same time, I’ve seen the potential of archaeological research guided by Native communities in strengthening and rebuilding ancestral knowledge and validating tribal history. During my time at the University of California, Berkeley, I worked on collaborative projects with Native communities and came to understand the potential for archaeology as a decolonizing practice capable of empowering Indigenous self-determination. I see great promise in the meeting of scientific and Native worldviews that they can be mutually informative and co-creative in developing meaningful answers for the problems we are facing today. While at Cambridge I will work towards understanding my own ancestors while pursuing a decolonizing archaeology that can meaningfully support, empower, inform Indigenous communities. I am very excited to be part of the Gates Cambridge community and look forward being part of a diverse group of international scholars collectively working to improve the lives of others.

Previous Education

University of California, Berkeley

I am a physician-scientist focused on investigating the mechanisms by which cancers cells metastasize, or spread, from the part of the body where they originate to distant organs. As a medical oncologist, I also treat patients with gastrointestinal cancers. By combining insights from my clinical and laboratory work, my ultimate goal is to develop more effective treatments for patients with advanced cancers.

Links

http://scholar.harvard.edu/alejandro_ganimian
http://www.eicargentina.org

Originally from Texas, I earned a Bachelor’s in neuroscience and a concurrent Master’s in chemistry at Harvard, where I adopted a “cell to society” approach, combining medicine, law, and policy as instruments for advocacy across different scales of change. At Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, I researched the development of a novel oncolytic virus to treat glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. I have also conducted policy research on AI-equipped medical devices, brain-machine interfaces, and healthcare access for refugees, presenting findings to key government and private sector stakeholders. Pursuing an MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience at Cambridge, I aim to leverage my background in science and policy to develop frameworks for governing and de-risking emerging technologies at the intersection of the digital world and life sciences— a field called cyberbiosecurity. Ultimately, I aspire to advocate for patients on a broader scale, ensuring advances in biotechnology are safeguarded through responsible governance and resilient health systems. I am honored and excited to join the Gates Cambridge community.

Previous Education

Harvard University Neuroscience

Plato and Aristotle agreed that we cannot begin to reach for the fruits of philosophy—scientific knowledge, wisdom, self-understanding—without the feeling of wonder. When motivated by power, fame or wealth, truth-seeking inquiry will likely amount to little more than clever sophistry. Wonder, they thought, is the one and only starting point of philosophy.

My PhD thesis investigates how Plato and Aristotle understand wonder and its role in philosophical life. What provokes wonder? Does it persist in the proper culmination or realisation of philosophy? And in what circumstances can the feeling be deceptive or even dangerous?

This research builds on my interest in Pierre Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy as a way of life and expands on my master’s thesis on wonder in Plato’s Theaetetus. As a tutor and research assistant of many years at my home university in Tasmania, I am also interested in how aspects of my project can be used to advocate for the humanities, defend the virtues of basic research, and inspire learning in the classroom, lecture theatre, and beyond.

Previous Education

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen Ancient Philosophy 2019
University of Tasmania [No major] 2015

I was born in the Alps in Italy and grew up in a small town close to Milan. I received my bachelors degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Biological Engineering with a minor in Management. I have worked in several labs in institutions including Imperial College, École Polytechnique, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the MIT Media Lab. I am excited to start my PhD at the Cambridge Center for Medical Materials. I am particularly interested in implantable technologies and the development of biomaterials for use in regenerative medicine. Through my travels and extra-curricular activities, I have also grown passionate about healthcare delivery, particularly in developing countries. In the long term, I want to work towards developing low cost medical technologies to be used in resource-limited settings.

As well as working as Gates Cambridge's Communications Officer two and half days a week and as a freelance journalist. Mandy’s background is in education and health journalism. She was features editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement and also worked for the BBC as a senior broadcast journalist as well as for the writers' association International PEN as a researcher on freedom of expression issues.