Directory

My experiences travelling between my native country of Colombia and the United States have made me distinctly aware of the inequalities among different countries. These experiences combined with my interest in the natural environment have formed the foundation of my interest in the field of development and environment. I hope that my research at Cambridge will provide me with the tools to influence development patterns so that they become more environmentally and socially responsible.

I am a multidisciplinary decolonial feminist scholar with an atypical academic journey, a Gates Scholar, and the former leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Perth (Western Australia). My 2023 MA (by Research) in Historical Studies, which was my first university degree, investigated the dress choices of Creole Mauritian women. My PhD aims to further dissect this sartorial narrative, emphasising its aspects of gendered, racial, and cultural resistance. I am also a textile artist, known professionally as Ubuntu Fibres, and many of my published works appear under the name ‘Christelle Collet’. I am committed to exploring and advocating for the identity and voice of Black women, particularly within the context of Mauritian colonial and patriarchal legacies and their persistent socio-cultural effects. My research intertwines community engagement and artistic methodologies. Before my MA, I engaged in support and advocacy for various communities, later transitioning into diversity and inclusion education and consultancy. I led ‘Project One Heart’, focusing on the stories of families of Colour and families of marginalised genders across Australia. Additionally, I contributed to various research projects, publishing on the narratives of Black Creole women, their defiance against oppressive systems, and intersectionality within the Indian Ocean region. Notably, I co-authored and co-edited the groundbreaking book 'Women in the Making of Mauritian History' in 2021.

Previous Education

University of Mauritius History (Hist6000) 2023
University of Western Australia Law & Society/Political Scienc

Links

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

I am from Hyattsville, Maryland and most of my childhood summers were spent in the humid climates of Guatemala––saturated in the culture of storytelling. During my studies at Towson University, I returned to the stories of my girlhood. As a recipient of the Leadership for Public Good Fellowship, I collected the oral histories of Guatemalans on their encounters with regional folkloric figures, amplifying occluded voices via cultural/archival work. I built upon my fieldwork in my thesis, where I examined the function of orature and its products as counterstories and symptoms of colonial trauma. During my MPhil at Cambridge, I will broaden my work to the larger Central American diaspora to exhibit how orature and its practice operate as a collective narratological and rhetorical (method)ology that opposition colonial narratives, allowing for new ones to emerge. By re-reckoning the violence represented in the literary and lived, I seek to reassess how narratives are constructed and taught globally through the language and experiences of the oppressed to highlight the anticolonial possibilities extant in intergenerational stories. I am honored to join the Gates Cambridge community, where we all look forward to building a better world.

Previous Education

Towson University English with Literature Track 2022
Towson University Psychology 2022

I graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in May 2010 with a B.S. in Systems Engineering. Driven by a passion for curbing the effects of anthropogenic climate change while meeting growing global energy demands, I sat for an MPhil in Nuclear Engineering at Cambridge, conducting fuel cycle research on a thorium reactor concept known as the Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactor. I am currently serving as a submarine warfare officer in the U.S. Navy.

Previous Education

University of British Columbia Bachelor of Arts (Honours) 2012

Treating injuries and diseases of the brain and spinal cord remains one of the greatest challenges in medicine, with current therapies being insufficient to promote recovery in most instances of damage to the brain. My work at Cambridge aims to identify new targets for biochemical and genetic therapies for regenerating functional connectivity of neurons at the injury site by focusing on the genetic basis of the interaction between neurons and astrocytes in the injured central nervous system. After Cambridge, I will return to the United States to pursue a joint MD/PhD and continue researching treatment modalities for central nervous system injury and disease. Eventually, I hope to work as a physician-scientist in a setting similar to the Brain Repair Centre at Cambridge, searching for and then implementing a “cure” for previously debilitating or fatal diseases and injuries of the brain and spinal cord.

Previous Education

Princeton University Neuroscience and Molecular Biology 2012

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-barson-701b5b19/?originalSubdomain=uk

How do we leverage the widest possible array of human ability to confront the challenges we face as a species? Through the lens of my self-identify as a neuro- and physio- divergent individual, I am driven to seek deeper understandings of the very nature of human ability--how it can be fostered, and how it is stifled. As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, I constructed an individualized program around the study of ability, continuing this interdisciplinary work with a Cambridge MPhil. For 12 years I have been part of a participatory-action research team at Boston University that designed and implemented programs to teach self-advocacy skills to youth with "disabilities." Informed by these experiences, I have become a dis/diff-ability activist and speaker, and I am currently a writing book called, "The Theory of Everyone." My PhD research will explore innovative methodologies to identify and leverage diverse human abilities - informed, I hope, by insights from this extraordinary circle that I am honored to join. Ultimately, I seek to become an academic activist and agent of change in the structures and organisations that impact the development of all human potential.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Health Medicine and Society 2020
University of Massachusetts at Amherst Social Phil. Comm. Theory 2018
Harvard Extension School Advanced Soc. Science Research 2018

Previous Education

University of Cambridge BA Theology and Religious Studies 2001
University of Delhi B.Sc. Physics 1998

During my undergraduate study at the University of Michigan, I majored in International Norms, Security, and Cooperation with a focus in the Middle East. I gained insight into the region through courses covering politics, culture, and history of the Middle East. Additionally, I had the opportunity to study in Egypt, pursue a Fulbright grant in Bahrain last year and am currently working with Syrian refugees in Turkey. Through my academic study and my experiences working and traveling abroad, I became specifically interested in the relationship between grass-roots elements like culture and language and the development of law and policy, especially in regards to human rights. Through the Gates Cambridge scholarship, I will be undertaking the MPhil in Public Policy at Cambridge in order to gain nuanced understanding into the complex process of policy development, analysis, and implementation. Through my MPP degree from Cambridge and the support from the Gates Cambridge community, I aspire to become an expert in the fields of international law and human rights policy and work to create culturally cognoscente, ethical, and effective policy for non-governmental and governmental organizations assisting in the implementation of development projects and attainment of foreign policy goals.

I recently completed my law degree from the University of California Berkeley School of Law with a specialization in International Law.

Previous Education

University of Michigan

Dr Melisa Basol is a Social Psychologist and part of the 2022 Class of Forbes 30 under 30.

In collaboration with the UK Cabinet Office (and supported by UNESCO, UN, and WHO), Melisa co-developed 'Go Viral!', a gamified intervention to combat the threat posed by COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracies. 'Go Viral!' has been played over 1.5 million times since it's launch and is now available in 10+ languages.

Melisa also collaborates with the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and Duke University's efforts to fight vaccine hesitancy. She enjoys public engagement (e.g., BBC World, TedX) and continues to advise governmental institutions (e.g. EU Commission, NATO) on evidence-based policy-making.

As a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, she read Psychology and focused on persuasion and resistance against misinformation through inoculation theory. Alongside numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications, Melisa was also awarded the WhatsApp Research Grant for Misinformation to help develop, test, and launch interventions against the spread of harmful misinformation on WhatsApp in India, Brazil, and the UK.

Previous Education

University of Wales, Aberystwyth
University of Cambridge

Links

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

As an infectious disease epidemiologist, I conduct research focusing on vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. I aim to understand the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases, to assess the impact of vaccines and vaccination programs, and to determine optimal strategies for communicable disease prevention and control. Currently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University.

Previous Education

Princeton University A.B. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 2003

Links

http://www.nicolebasta.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-e-basta

I was born and raised in California's Silicon Valley, and studied mathematics at Yale University. I enjoy using math to solve problems, both practical and theoretical. In internships, I have analyzed internet activity at Advertising.com and modeled interest rate volatility at a hedge fund.  I recently spoke on my work at a seminar New York and a conference in San Diego, and submitted a paper to the Journal of Number Theory. In addition to being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, I was awarded six prizes at Yale: five for mathematics and one for literary criticism. Having seen the value and beauty of mathematics in my own life, I want to share it with others.  To that end, I tutored students in high school and college and founded the Yale Undergraduate Math Society. At Cambridge, I will undertake Part III of the Mathematical Tripos en route to a doctorate.  As a professor, I plan to work to improve the way universities teach undergraduate mathematics.

After an MPhil in Theoretical Chemistry, I moved into theoretical physics to understand more about more fundamental processes in different systems. My supervisor and group in Cambridge and the support of the Trust have helped me enormously during this transition. I am now working towards my PhD in the area of ultracold atoms. I hope that at some point I will be able to make use of all the different aspects of my education.

Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and understanding how species survive in changing landscapes is essential for effective conservation. One major threat is habitat fragmentation, which disrupts the connectivity species need to survive. I am interested in how animals move and persist in fragmented landscapes and how we can use this understanding to support their conservation. During my studies at ETH Zurich, I conducted research across multiple systems—from fish biodiversity in tropical rivers to shifting mountain treelines across Europe. My Master’s thesis at Yale examined how movement constraints influence space use predictions in endangered whooping cranes. My PhD at Cambridge will combine translocation experiments in Africa with global trait-based modeling to explore how morphology predicts dispersal and connectivity. By linking fieldwork, data synthesis, and spatial modeling, I aim to strengthen conservation planning by scaling connectivity metrics across taxa and grounding them in biological realism. Working under the supervision of Professor Robert Fletcher, I look forward to advancing ecological science and contributing to practical strategies that sustain species persistence in fragmented ecosystems.

Previous Education

Royal Institute of Technology Ecology
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Interdisciplinary Sciences

Previous Education

Barnard College
Oxford University

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and during my time in Cambridge, I worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. For my MPhil thesis, I analyzed rare decays of the Z boson, a well-known Standard Model particle, in order to calibrate mass measurements of the recently-discovered Higgs boson. I am currently a PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford University, where I work on the Dark Energy Survey, a wide-field cosmology survey using a 4-meter optical telescope in Chile, as well as hardware development for the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Previous Education

University of Chicago Physics 2012

Links

https://mbaumer.github.io
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbaumer