Directory

Jennifer Ifft is the Flinchbaugh Agricultural Policy Chair, Associate Professor, and Extension Specialist in Agricultural Policy at Kansas State University. She has an integrated research and extension program that covers policy and regulatory issues that affect the viability of U.S. and Kansas agriculture. Her current projects are in the areas of nontraditional finance, crop insurance, farmland markets and farm labor. She has published on how farm programs and regulations are capitalized into farmland values, farmland value determinants and measurement, farm labor and management, and crop insurance and farm debt. She also regularly publishes in the farm press and works with farm sector policymakers and stakeholders. Before coming to Kansas State University, she was an assistant professor at the Cornell University Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and worked in the Farm Economy Branch of the USDA Economic Research Service. She has a PhD from the University of California - Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She grew up on her family’s farm in central Illinois.

Previous Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign B.S. International Resource and Consumer Econom. 2002

Links

https://www.ageconomics.k-state.edu/directory/faculty_directory/ifft/index.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferifft

Rameen Iftikhar is an education and gender specialist. She has led research and implementation efforts for gender justice through outreach and pedagogy in the Global South. She has pioneered a multimodal approach to gender diversity, violence, and governance in South Asia as the lead investigator of an AHRC-funded grant. She has served as a policy consultant for The Asia Foundation, where she developed a systems reform framework for foundational literacy and numeracy for governments in Southeast Asia. She co-founded Aghaaz, a community-based organisation for at-risk youth in Pakistan, where she designed and implemented programs for vulnerable K-12 students. Drawing from her background in economics, politics, and international development, her doctoral research explores the potential of communities to expand girls’ education and life paths. Her work investigates if the knowledge, skills and resources that young girls gain from education translate into capabilities that allow them to dream of and pursue alternative life paths and envisions communities as key levers of change in these relationships. She graduated as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Pennsylvania with an MSEd in International Education Development program.

Previous Education

Lahore University of Management Sciences Politics & Economics
University of Pennsylvania Int. Educational Development

Zsuzsanna Ihar is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre. She is also a Gates scholar and a member of the research project “From Collection to Cultivation”—a Wellcome-funded research initiative led by Prof. Helen Anne Curry. Since 2023, Ihar has convened the research network “Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry and War,” funded by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), with Dr. Layla Renshaw, Prof. Paola Filippucci, and Jo Sweeney. She was previously a Knowledge Management Fellow at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and a Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her dissertation, titled 'Missiles, Modernity, and the Machair: A History of the Scottish Hebrides and its Militarisation (1940-2024)', examines the impact of military infrastructure, technology, and R&D on the rural communities of the Hebridean archipelago. She is interested in the knowledge-making practices of both military personnel and civilians, militarised imaginaries, livelihoods, and lore, as well as the impact of military decisions on the everyday. Her research engages with declassified military documents, oral history collections, and activist archives. She has conducted fieldwork in both the Outer and Inner Hebrides.

Links

https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/ihar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zsuzsannaihar

Since completing my Gates Trust supported PhD in 2014 I have continued to research issues around education inequality. Currently I lead a portfolio of research evaluating interventions designed to address socio-economic gaps in school attainment and higher education access and participation. I am an associate professor at the Faculty of Education University a Cambridge. I hold a Fellowship at Hughes Hall, and am Director of Studies in Education and Fitzwilliam in Cambridge.

Links

https://fairlab.co.uk

I am a volcanologist, specialising in emissions and deposition of volcanic aerosol. Volcanoes are one of the principal natural sources of reactive gases and aerosol particles. Persistently degassing volcanoes have significant local and often regional effects on the atmosphere, terrestrial ecology, agriculture and human health. I have worked on active volcanoes in Iceland, Central America, Japan, and Antarctica.

Previous Education

United States Naval Academy Bachelor of ScienceMechanical Engineering 2019

My immediate academic interests lie in the area of speech processing, specifically the recognition of emotions in human speech and the integration of emotional attitudes into state of the art speech synthesisers. On a higher level, I am interested in ways of defining emotional intelligence, its role in human cognitive capabilities and its integration into machines that may attempt to substitute humans in various fields.

As an undergraduate studying geology, geochemistry, and archaeological sciences at MIT, my research interests span the intersections among those fields to better understand how the natural environments of the past shaped human movement and decision-making. I believe that looking to past civilization change can be a powerful means to drive climate activism today, and I aim to apply the lessons learned from my research to inform modern climate policy and industry, especially in my home state of California. As a NOAA Hollings Scholar, I explored impact-driven groundwater geochemistry in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, and as an MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium fellow, I have reconstructed late Pleistocene paleoclimate of Northeastern Mexico. At Cambridge, I will undertake a Research MPhil in Earth Sciences with Dr. David Hodell at the Godwin Lab for Paleoclimate, where I will investigate the impact of past climate on the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapán via cave sediment records. My goal is to address resolution difficulties in pairing paleoclimate and archaeological data while contributing to our understanding of human-climate-environment changes in the Yucatán peninsula, especially during times of drought and conflict.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Geosciences 2023

Since completing school education, I have had a firm intention to become a biomedical researcher who can translate research queries into practical application for the Indonesian people. My journey towards that dream is always challenging, but interesting and full of contemplation at the same time. I have gone through a set of diverse experiences at the past to finally formulate my own direction for this dream; from being a bioengineer that produced a cancer cell-specific inducer of apoptosis from a chicken anaemia virus gene to founding my own start-up company focusing on natural product utilisation for bacterial infections. Now, I am directing my future to become an immunologist that aims at ending the global issue of antibiotic resistance. To this end, I am looking forward to enhancing my skills in research by undertaking a PhD with Prof Okkenhaug & Dr Conway Morris, where I will investigate how we can manipulate the human neutrophil phosphoproteomic response to Staphylococcus aureus and identify potential non-antibiotic therapies for augmenting the host clearance of this crucial pathogen. This degree will be paramount for me to establish biomedical research environment in Indonesia and help developing Indonesian biopharmaceutical industry. Such work will be of relevance to many similar nations, and will help address the global burden of infectious diseases. In my spare time, I love spending time with my family and friends & writing my bioscience blog at iqbalmuhammad.com.

At the University of Cambridge, I studied the political economy of health. During my PhD, I studied the link between privatisation policies and increased alcohol-related mortality rates. I have worked in health and healthcare research since I completed my studies because I am passionate about health and healthcare and I believe that we can use our achievements in science and technology to improve people's health all over the world. As a Gates Cambridge alumna, I strive to make people believe they can create change and improve not only their own lives but also the lives of others.

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/darja-irdam-b76365158

Before coming to Cambridge for MPhil Development Studies, I was working as a Civil Servant in Pakistan - involved in multilateral negotiations at the WTO and part of the Trade Policy formulation team. After completing my PhD in the Political Economy of International Trade, I am now working at Pakistan's Permanent Mission to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.

I grew up in the small city of Aligarh in India and studied at Aligarh Muslim University where I became politically involved in issues of gender equality. I took up Women’s Studies as one of my subsidiary subjects. My interest in the area led me to a Master’s in Gender, Media and Culture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I then worked as Equality and Diversity Adviser at the London School of Economics and Political Science for five years while also writing about gender and race issues as a freelance journalist for The Guardian, New Statesman, Open Democracy, etc.At Cambridge, my PhD (2015-19) explored gender and class formations in urban India through an ethnography with young lower middle class women employed in services, such as, in shopping malls, cafes, call centres, and offices in Delhi. Following the PhD, I was selected for a Junior Research Fellowship (2019-22) at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where I developed a new project on gender, digital technology, and the future of work in India. In January 2022, I was appointed Lecturer in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, where I continue to work.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science (Un
Aligarh Muslim University

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/asiya-islam/17/462/106
http://twitter.com/asiyaislam

I grew up in Pretoria, South Africa but studied and worked in Johannesburg. Between 2008 and 2011 I was involved in multi-country research on democracy and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011 I read for a master’s degree in African studies. My dissertation analysed the fall of a dominant political party which had governed for twenty years. I am interested in democratisation in Africa particularly with regard to the efficacy and integrity of elections in dominant party states. My doctorate will examine the relationship between voters and political parties to understand what draws voters to political parties. The influence of government performance, ethnicity, clientelism, leadership and ideology will be considered to determine if voters are making rational choices when they vote or if they are motivated by deeper, intrinsic ties to political parties instead. I hope to write a book on elections in Africa to stimulate debate on how citizens use their right to vote.

Noah Isserman is an academic, strategist, and entrepreneur focused on the financing and future of social goods. He is Visiting Assistant Professor-elect of Business Administration and Social Work at the University of Illinois, where is founding director of two campus-wide programs: Social Innovation (socialinnovation.illinois.edu) and the iVenture Accelerator for top student startups (iventure.illinois.edu). He is also one of four Core Committee members working on the design and rollout of a new $50M Design Center for the campus.As a consultant, Noah has worked on five continents, independently and with Common Ground Consulting, with dozens of organizations and boards on strategy, process, and messaging As an entrepreneur and CEO, Noah has helped build and sell two profitable enterprises — WholeData, LLC, acquired by the Upjohn Institute, and MAStorage, Inc., — both of which deliberately generated social and commercial value. Noah marries his professional experience with broader theory in academic research and teaching. He has designed and delivered courses at the Universities of Cambridge and Illinois at the undergraduate, MBA, MSt, and MTech levels. Noah’s work and research in civil society has been funded by the US State Department and Aga Khan Foundation, among many others, and has been recognized by more than a dozen awards and fellowships. He holds degrees from Amherst College (cognitive neuroscience) and Cambridge (economic geography).

Links

https://business.illinois.edu/profile/noah-isserman
http://www.noahisserman.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isserman

I’m from Valdivia, a small city in southern Chile, and since I can remember I have been interested in history and music. For this reason, studying musicology has been a real gift in my life. I have been quite involved in conservation and heritage in Chile, restoring historic instruments and also founding and developing archives and music collections. I have written various books and papers on the way identity and music have been relevant for the development of different communities in my country. For my PhD in Cambridge I hope to write on the changes in cultural life from colonial to republican times in South America, with a special interest in the Viceroyalty of Peru and how European-style music was rethought at this time in such a different place from where it was created. Much of this music has never been heard before, being buried for centuries, so it is always very exciting to find and rediscover old scores for the first time, studying them and the musicians behind the notes.

Through my Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, I aim to make critical contributions to the fields of memory, trauma, and Kurdish studies and to advance academic place-making for underrepresented narratives and communities. As an aspiring anthropologist, I envision a path of engaged, interdisciplinary scholarship that can provide theoretical contributions to incumbent community dialogue and political reform and set potential frameworks for transformative justice in the aftermath of violence and genocide.

Previous Education

Utrecht University Law
Vrije University Amsterdam Peace, Trauma and Religion

What processes were involved in the evolution of the modern human brain and cognition? How can we study such processes? The material culture studied by archaeologists to understand the cognition and mind of early humans are the art objects left by people of early cultures. Some of the earliest examples of art belong to the European Upper Palaeolithic- a culture spanning between 30,000 to 10,000 years. The human subject in this art has been a controversial topic due to its supposed poor quality of execution and has led to numerous debates about the dichotomy observed in the graphical depiction of animal vs. human subject. Human figure is one of the fundamental subjects in modern society as it is one of the first figures drawn by children. Therefore what can we learn about the perceptual processes of the Palaeolithic people with regards to the human form. Was this schemata stable for the entire Upper Palaeolithic as proposed for the animal figure or did it change from phase to another?