Directory

Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I followed an interest in bioscience and the human condition to London for medical school. There, my longstanding curiosity about the inner workings of the human body, combined with exposure to patients with acute brain injury – whether on the wards, in clinics, or in the operating theatre – deepened my interest in the pathophysiology and management of these complex conditions. My research centres on understanding and targeting the molecular and cellular mechanisms driving brain injury, with a particular focus on mitochondrial dysfunction and neuroinflammation following traumatic brain injury (TBI). During my PhD in Clinical Neurosciences, my work will involve ex vivo metabolic analysis of cerebral microdialysate from neurocritical care patients as well as development of in vitro cellular models of TBI to investigate these secondary injury processes, identify biomarkers, and aid in the clinical translation of novel neuroprotective agents. It is an honour to join the cohort of Gates Scholars, and I look forward to growing within this mission-driven community as I work toward bridging the gap between innovative research and compassionate patient care.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Medical Science

I completed a BSc in Psychology at York University, Glendon Campus; J.D. at Columbia Law School; and Master II at Sciences Po Paris. I then spent a year as a law clerk and associate at an international law firm. During these experiences, I developed an interest in ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. I became interested in how rigorous philosophical analysis can allow us to challenge our assumptions about what constitutes morally permissible behaviour, particularly in the context of interpersonal relationships. In addition, I was drawn to questions about whether the legal framework for shaping conduct in the sphere of intimate relationships is normatively justifiable and, more broadly, the extent to which the legal system is an appropriate vehicle for advancing justice in the domain of intimate relationships. During my MPhil in Philosophy at Cambridge, I aim to continue exploring these topics through research, with an eye to how insights in ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy can drive reform in the law and rethinking of policy.

Previous Education

Columbia University Law 2023
Sciences PO, Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris Economic Law 2023

My research focuses on a class of proteins called intrinsically disordered proteins. Unlike most well-studied proteins, such as those responsible for immunological responses, catalysis, and DNA replication, disordered proteins have no rigid three-dimensional structure and are instead highly dynamic. Despite their high prevalence in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes, these proteins receive little attention, likely a result of how difficult they are to observe experimentally. My doctoral research will combine experimental methods with high-powered modelling techniques to understand these proteins and their relation to disease. Originally from Chicago, I attended Pomona College, where I double majored in chemistry and mathematics. There, I studied topics ranging from protein-ligand binding to topological complexity in protein structures (such as knots and links). My love of working at the intersection of biochemistry, math, and physics led me to begin working with Professor Michele Vendruscolo at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar, where I am combining computational methods with experimental techniques to understand the interactions between disordered proteins and therapeutic drugs. I am keen to improve the ways in which biochemists obtain information about protein function and stability and am intrigued by the potential of such work to have direct implications on our understanding and treatment of disease.

Previous Education

Pomona College
University of Cambridge

Anne Heminger is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Tampa. Her research centres on the English Reformation, examining how the composition, dissemination, and performance of religious music shaped the early modern construction of English identity in the sixteenth century. Her book project, titled Confession Carried Aloft: Music, Religious Politics, and National Identity in Mid-Tudor London, highlights the key role religious music played in fueling competing and historically rooted notions of Englishness from Henry VIII’s break with Rome into the first years of Elizabeth I’s reign.

Anne holds a BA in music from the University of Chicago, an MPhil in musicology from Cambridge, and a PhD in historical musicology from the University of Michigan. She is the author of two articles: “Music Theory at Work: The Eton Choirbook, Rhythmic Proportions, and Musical Networks in Sixteenth-Century England,” (Early Music History, 2018) and “‘Zu dienst wan sy syngen jn eynn:’ Music, Politics, and the Reformed Livonian Service Books of 1530 and 1537,” published in Celebrating Lutheran Church Music (Uppsala University Press, 2019). She is currently at work on two further articles on English music printing and the music of Christopher Tye. Beyond the English Reformation, her research and teaching interests include late medieval devotional culture, liturgy and ritual studies, the development of music printing and technology, and twentieth-century Baltic choral music.

Previous Education

University of Chicago

I was first introduced to the enormous potential of statistical modelling and machine learning during my undergraduate degree at the LSE and master’s degree at Imperial College. Later on, I worked as a Data Scientist to optimize API production yield in large-scale production for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, where I noticed a large gap between assumptions made in statistical theory and real-world applications. While deep learning models have the potential to improve many applications in biotechnology research and medicine, their reliance on vast, thoroughly labeled datasets often presents a significant bottleneck to real-world adoption. Additionally, their lack of transparency impedes the trust by practitioners, researchers, and patients. I have explored this problem throughout my Computer Science MPhil at Cambridge by studying how we can use design more intuitive decision-making tools for different cancer screening tasks. During my PhD, I am developing multimodal fusion and self-supervised learning methods for heterogeneous biomedical data modalities. My research focuses on learning meaningful representations of human tissue using histology, bulk sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics data from cancer biopsies without relying on exhaustive manual annotation to improve common diagnostic tasks like tumor staging, subtyping, and predicting treatment outcomes.

I am a technology and healthcare executive. I currently lead Enterprise Sales for DACH, Eastern Europe and Israel for VMware, a provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. My mission is to enable and equip sales teams to sell more strategically, shape and close big(ger) deals. I am a big believer in empathy and a thorough understanding of customer needs to deliver superior customer value. I am also a board member for a leading European health and social care software provider. I have a background in strategy consulting, working for Bain & Company on corporate strategy & transformations for tech and healthcare clients. I have been living in Switzerland (first Geneva, now Zurich) since 2015.

Links

http://everydayservicedesign.blogspot.co.uk
http://eva-maria.hempe.org
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-maria-hempe

Climate change is making the global food supply more expensive and volatile, threatening our most basic human need. Through my PhD, I intend to look at the fallout, investigating how climate-driven food inflation could stall economic mobility for families and fuel political polarization. My path to this question began at Reichman University, where I studied Sustainability and Economics and joined the Economics Honors and Aviram Sustainability & Climate programs. Throughout my degree, I worked at a climatetech startup and a VC fund; in parallel, I became the first student in my faculty to publish peer-reviewed research, co-authoring a paper in a Nature Portfolio journal on digital twins and ocean conservation. From there, I consulted for financial institutions on climate-related risks and researched energy security and natural resource rehabilitation in Israel. I am now pursuing the MPhil in Economic Research as a Gates Scholar at Cambridge. Drawing on my experience across academia, the private sector, and policy research, I aim to produce work connecting climate and food policy to its downstream human consequences. I am deeply grateful to Gates Cambridge for the opportunity to pursue my PhD within this extraordinary community.

Previous Education

Reichman University Sustainability and Economics 2024
University of Cambridge Economic Research

With a background in biomedical engineering and product design, I am passionate about harnessing engineering advancements for the improvement of health. My research is focused on innovative solutions for the manufacture of affordable medical technology with an emphasis on local production in resource limited settings. In the future, I hope to continue to facilitate the transfer of the scientific developments in academic research into technology that increases accessibility to healthcare.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania
University of Cambridge

Rob Henderson is the best-selling author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. He grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and in the rural town of Red Bluff, California. After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force at the age of seventeen, he subsequently attended Yale on the GI Bill and was then awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge (St. Catharine’s College), where he obtained a PhD in psychology in 2022. Rob’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe, among other outlets, and his newsletter is sent each week to more than fifty thousand subscribers.

Previous Education

Community College of the Air Force
Yale University

As a clinician-researcher, I have been working with patients diagnosed with neurodegenerative conditions since 2017 and am passionate about translating research findings to the clinical context. My research emphasis has been on frontotemporal lobar degeneration and its subtypes, particularly primary progressive aphasia (PPA), which are fast progressing, often misdiagnosed, and have no effective treatment. During my PhD, my studies spanned the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Centre for Frontotemporal Dementia and Related Disorders. In my thesis, I discussed barriers to the assessment of progressive aphasias and presented exemplars of transdiagnostic approaches to improve clinical characterisation of language-based dementias. My research focusses on understanding how word meaning is stored and accessed in the brain, and the nature of impairments that result when crucial brain regions are affected by PPA. My work also includes novel aphasia research tools designed to be simple, scalable, sensitive, yet speak to the neurobiology of language.

Previous Education

MGH Institute of Health Profes Speech Language Pathology 2018
Columbia University Psychology 2015

After graduating with degrees in History and Classical Humanities from Miami University, I spent the next few years far removed from academia. It was my experience outside the classroom, which instilled in me the significance of academic inquiry, and the potential impact of historical scholarship more specifically. While volunteering in a refugee camp, I was a constant witness to the creation of historical documents. I wanted to know who decided what records of any given event survived. I was curious to know how anyone might archive the records of displaced peoples and who had access to those records. Upon my return, I decided to pursue dual-master’s degrees in both History and Archive Management at Simmons University, to better understand how the information sciences inform the humanities. As I pursue a PhD in History, my focus remains on transnational events and displaced peoples not only as subjects of inquiry but as individuals with a unique admittance into the archival record who provide a significant perspective on collecting practice. It is my belief that the questions we ask of the past inform the questions we ask of ourselves. I am honored and grateful for the opportunity to join the Gates Cambridge community!

Previous Education

Simmons University History 2022
Miami University History, Classical Humanities 2015

After working in the private sector for eight years in my native the Netherlands, I moved to South Africa in my mid twenties to study sociology and gender studies at the University of Cape Town. This is where I developed my interest in the sociology and politics of international development. A Fulbright fellowship allowed me to take this interest to Columbia University in New York, where I did a Master in Human Rights. At Columbia, I grew interested in the rise of philantro-capitalism and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) industry, and the ways in which these industries are linked to and perpetuate systems of power and inequality. My M.A thesis used the feminist philanthropy and humanitarian alliances of the sports giant Nike as a case study to examine the consequences of this trend, a topic I was able to further investigate as a journalist in Vietnam. For this investigation, which was published at Slate and supported by The Nation Institute in New York, I interviewed 18 Nike workers about their wages and working conditions. These conversations, coupled with other journalistic work on this subject and a consultancy project with the International Labour Organization sparked my desire to investigate the CSR industry, particularly its labour dimensions, as a PhD student at Cambridge's Center for Development Studies. I am both thrilled and honoured that I will have the opportunity to do so as a Gates Cambridge student and a member of King's College.

Previous Education

University of Cape Town
Columbia University in the City of New York

Born in Canada, but raised primarily in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, I attended Purdue University and graduated with a bachelors of science in environmental and ecological engineering. As a student at Purdue, I led a team working to address water scarcity in the community of Endallah, Tanzania. Beyond applying my technical, engineering knowledge, this project made me aware of the complex, multidisciplinary challenges in creating and maintaining sustainable water systems around the world. Taking up classes and other learning opportunities in subjects including economics and diversity studies, I have strived to incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives into my work. At Cambridge, I plan to further my interdisciplinary studies by pursuing the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development and researching how economics can be incorporated in engineering to design system strategies for sustainable water resources globally. Outside of my academic interests, I enjoy running, hiking, travelling, music, community involvement, and coffee. I am so excited to join the Gates Cambridge community, and look forward to building relationships with other scholars who are working to make a difference in the world.

Previous Education

Purdue University

Previous Education

University of Cambridge
Sciences Po Paris; University of North Carolina
Humboldt University; Free University Berlin

The research that I have been carried out during already two years in the University of Cambridge involves the study of the implementation of the wet soil mixing method for improving the mechanical properties of organic soils. This research together with my previous experience in seismic response of soft soils will give me a great opportunity to combine them in order to focus my future career in the seismic analysis of foundations.

Victoria is interested in exploring the nexus of climate change, human development, and public policy in the Arctic. Her PhD research focuses on how images and aesthetic codes construct values, identities, and ideas of power in the Arctic since the Second World War. From a young age Victoria's grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, has inspired her to pursue a career promoting social justice and empowerment. During her undergraduate degree, she followed that inspiration through two emerging personal interests - art and environmentalism. Through internships at The Smithsonian Institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she helped to create programs to bring different, often contentious, communities together through museum educational events. At the Untied Nations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she later worked on research, writing, and advocacy for climate justice, urban resiliency in socioeconomically depressed neighbourhoods, and mitigation. Though passionate about art, climate change, and social justice individually, it was not until her Fulbright research that Victoria was able to bring her three disparate interests together. During her year in Canada, she studied how indigenous civil society groups used visual media to empower their voices at climate change negotiations. At Cambridge, she continues this multidisciplinary approach to scholarship by examining the changing visual narratives of geopolitics in the Arctic and its influence on perceptions of power, justice, and agency. As the Alumni Officer Victoria works closely with the Gates Cambridge Alumni Association to connect the scholar and alumni communities.

My passion for astronomy has been an integral part of most of my life: as I realized at the age of 12 that current theories only explain 5% of the cosmos, making a scientific contribution that would shed light on the dark sector of cosmology became my main career goal. Several years later, this unwavering curiosity motivated my Honours thesis centred on the calibration of the CHIME telescope. I then collaborated with the H0LiCOW team, analysing lensed quasars as probes of the Hubble constant, before focusing on the use of machine learning to search for deviations from general relativity in gravitational waves. While studying quantum field theory, I became fascinated by the interconnectedness between the smallest and largest scales of the universe, a central issue in inflationary physics. My PhD will aim to detect signatures of primordial gravitational waves in the CMB and constrain models of the early universe. Despite the abstract nature of my topic, I hope for my research to make a broader impact through the development of computational methods with a wide range of applications. Becoming a Gates Scholar is a great honour which will also allow me to build upon my experience with science outreach and advocating for women in STEM.

Previous Education

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Physics 2021
University of British Columbia Physics 2019
Ecole Polytechnique federale de lausanne Physics 2019

I am a mental health researcher aiming to outline evidence-based practical conclusions for clinicians. I am interested in prevalent psychopathologies (PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders), striving to understand their transdiagnostic mechanisms and promote effective and tailored interventions. I hold a BSc in psychology, biology, and neuroscience, and MA in clinical psychology, all from Tel-Aviv University. In recent years, I combined research and clinical practice in Israel’s public health services, to attain a holistic perspective on psychopathology. At Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, I will investigate the cognitive processes that underlie formulation-based interventions for PTSD, emphasizing the dynamics of negative appraisals and trauma memory. To that end, I plan to bring a personalized approach to my research, assimilating the notion of ‘precision medicine’ into evidence-based psychotherapy. I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Gates Cambridge community and study alongside inspiring peers and mentors.

Previous Education

Tel Aviv University Clinical psychology 2022
Tel Aviv University Psychology with neuroscience 2019
Tel Aviv University Biology with neuroscience 2019