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A question overtook me during a drive through the Pennsylvania Wilds in 2015. How might people in life situations of “exile” have access to theology and literature itself conceived out of exile? Thus, a passion for Dante that had begun during my first year of seminary at the University of Notre Dame developed into a weekly Dante study group at my local prison in northeast PA, and through my exposure to the lives and hopes of these inmates over the course of two years, I began to see how Dante could be used to explore the fundamental structures of and possibilities for human unity, even in the midst of fragmentation and isolation. My research in the Faculty of Divinity will formalize this exploration by tracing the theological and metaphysical participation traditions in which Dante stands, delimiting his understanding of the inter-relationality among divine and human nature(s), and applying the systematic consequents of his theology of participation to new ways of thinking about social modalities, wherein pluralities of valuation and reasoning may cohere to address the anomies of our own day. As a Roman Catholic priest from a military family in Alabama, I am humbled to be part of the Gates community and eager to gain from it a deepening respect for the versatility of human goodness.

Previous Education

Seton Hall University
University of Notre Dame

I am from Seville, a city in the south of Spain. I started my academic journey at the University of Seville, where I completed a BSc in Biochemistry and a Master's in Molecular Genetics. During this time I was mesmerised by the complexity of life at the molecular level. I am particularly fascinated by the mechanisms Eukaryotic cells use to store their genetic information in the cell nucleus. Throughout my PhD, I seek to understand one of the great marvels of physical chemistry, how our meter-long DNA manages to condense dramatically to fit into the micrometre cell nucleus. This is an open question with huge implications for human health as it regulates how genes work. This question needs the lenses of physical chemistry to be solved. For this reason, the application of chromatin multiscale computational models—able to link the individual nucleosome behaviour to the whole chromatin organization—will help us to understand the basis of chromatin material properties.

Previous Education

Universidad de Sevilla MSc Molecular Genetics 2024
Universidad de Sevilla BSc Biochemistry 2023

I am passionate about infectious diseases and its dynamics. My career has led me from studying medicine in Portugal to working in humanitarian emergencies with Médecins Sans Frontières in Brazil and Yemen. As a specialist medical doctor in Public Health and travel medicine, and an infectious disease epidemiologist my research goal is to improve our understanding of infectious diseases, to comprehend the effect of interventions on the transmission and populations, and our ability to predict disease dynamics. I will work on chikungunya, a viral disease that is transmitted through mosquitoes, which puts 3.6 billion people at risk throughout South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. Infection can lead to severe complications that can last for months. Moreover, chikungunya epidemics are often explosive resulting in many infections. Despite the significant burden of disease, there remains a poor understanding of the disease dynamics. At the University of Cambridge, I will work in the Pathogen Dynamics Group and I will clarify the spatiotemporal distribution, as well as the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of chikungunya infections, focusing on the Asian continent.

Previous Education

Harvard Medical School Clinical Research 2021
Universidade Nova de Lisboa Public Health 2019

HE professional with over fifteen years of teaching and research experience in human geography and the humanities. Additionally, nearly a decade of experience in the coordination and management of international educational programs, research agendas, and development projects with significant budget, human resource management, and logistical responsibilities.

Previous Education

Princeton University MA Latin American Literatures and Cultures 2005
Portland State University MA Francophone Literatures and Cultures 1998
Portland State University MA Catalan Literature 1998

I was introduced to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French pioneer of the personal essay, during the Comparative and European Literatures MPhil course at Cambridge. As an undergraduate at Brown University, I had double concentrated in Comparative Literature and Art History, and found productive intersections between the two fields of study. I therefore was drawn to the simultaneously interdisciplinary and coherent nature of Montaigne’s oeuvre. He explores a diverse range of topics, including but not limited to bodily functions, education, sexuality, religion, the classics and friendship. Nevertheless, the Essais are unified by their author’s tendency to reserve judgment and question assumptions, and by his preoccupation with the vehicle he employs to convey his ideas: words, and the palpable yet contingent force they exercise over the physical and social world. In my PhD, I plan to explore this theme in Montaigne, and its implications for diplomacy and justice. I have spent the last two years teaching high school history, and hope that underscoring the stakes of communication through instruction in the humanities will foster more civil discourse on a local and global scale. I am thrilled to join the 2018 Gates cohort.

Previous Education

Brown University
University of Cambridge

Noam grew up in Israel and earned his B.A. from Sciences Po Paris in 2023, where his final dissertation examined the impact of colonisation on Jewish-Muslim relations among Maghrebi communities in France. In 2024, he completed an MPhil in Muslim-Jewish Relations at the University of Cambridge, focusing on how Yemeni Jews negotiated their Arabicized heritage after immigrating to the Holy Land. He has interned and worked with organizations fostering interfaith coexistence, including EcoPeace Middle East, the Woolf Institute, and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His PhD explores the lived experiences of rural Yemeni Jews—an under-researched community shaped by tribality, dispersion, and layered identities. Drawing on an endangered archive of over 1,200 oral testimonies, the project aims to reconstruct hyperlocal Jewish-Muslim relations in Yemen and deepen our understanding of intergroup cohesion in decentralised settings. Noam is also a classical tenor and a member of Christ’s College Chapel Choir.

Previous Education

Sciences PO, Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris Bachelor of Arts
University of Cambridge Middle Eastern Studies

Rob is currently a Professor of Technology Management and Strategy at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Prior to this, he worked in a wide variety of roles and locations for Shell International’s Exploration & Production division, and served as the company's Executive Coordinator of Global R&D. Rob is a Fellow of both the UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) and Engineers Australia, and is chartered as a Eur. Ing. in Europe. In addition to his position at QUT, Rob is a member of the United Nations' Expert Group on Resources and Energy, and serves the Australian Government on an ad hoc basis as a member of their Expert Network. He was also named as a Fulbright Scholar in 2020. Born and raised in Canada, Rob lives in the Brisbane area with his three sons.

Previous Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology SM Technology and Policy Program 1997
McMaster University B.Eng Mechanical Engineering 1995

At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied International Relations, Hispanic Studies, and African Studies, and had the opportunity to travel and work throughout Asia and South America. My undergraduate research focused on conflict-related sexual violence and whether the manipulation of ethnic identity influenced the prevalence of sexual violence in conflict zones. Following this, I worked for the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago as a disaster responder, and then at Public Narrative, a local nonprofit organisation that works to amplify underrepresented voices and stories in the media and public discourse to bring about positive change in Chicago communities. At Cambridge, I hope to combine my academic and 'practical' interests and experiences to study political engagement, identity, and forms and concepts of protest in Africa’s Great Lakes region. I hope to learn about the construction of inclusive systems of governance, particularly in post-conflict societies, and to apply this knowledge to advocate for the rights of marginalized populations throughout my career.

Previous Education

University of Pennsylvania

I am a medical student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota on a lovely public health academic leave, originally from Phoenix, Arizona. In pursuing a career as a public health physician, I hope to focus on addressing social determinants of health and women’s health issues, whether through work with an NGO or with a government agency. In medical school, I have been privileged to work with clinicians in multiple research projects, including examining post-partum depression outcomes, family planning educational models, medical students’ attitudes in service projects, and a humanities based anatomy project. I was also able to research domestic violence and public health in South Africa for one year as part of an undergraduate study abroad program focused on service learning; I have continued to work with women experiencing domestic violence in the Rochester community and focused a dance education project on domestic violence issues in Arizona.

I work as Lecturer in the School of International Relations at St Andrews University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). I completed my PhD as a Gates Scholar at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. Subsequently, I held post-doctoral positions at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS) in Oslo, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin and at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington.

My broad research interests lie in areas of global governance, international organisations and the politics of international law. I work on peace operations and state-building, questions of international authority, and broader politics of international interventions in (post-)conflict territories.

During my time at Cambridge I worked in a Supramolecular Chemistry group in which I made many, many good friends including Gates Scholars Sophie Beeren and Nandhini Ponnuswamy. The original goal of my research was to design, synthesize, and study a divalent porphyrinic ligand which would bind two different metal centres. Although the proposed synthetic methodology had been used extensively for thousands of other similiar derivates, when using the particular synthetic precursors I chose, a different kind of molecule was generated. My PhD became a much more fundamental and synthetic endeavour than I or my supervisor had expected. I investigated the structure and properties of the new molecule (an expanded porphyrin)and also the reaction that generated it.

Nicholas Petrie completed a PhD in Law between 2017-20. His thesis focused on human rights protections inherent in the Australian constitutional system. It was examined by Professor Trevor Allan and the Hon Robert French AC.

Prior to Cambridge, Nick had practised as a solicitor at top tier law firms, the UK Government Legal Department and the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency. He had also been a Judicial Assistant to the Rt Hon Lord Dyson. In additon, Nick had volunteered at a number of institutions, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

After leaving Cambridge, Nick joined the Victorian Bar, where he has a broad practice, including a focus on human rights and climate change litigation.

Further details can be found here: https://www.vicbar.com.au/profile/9863

Previous Education

University of Melbourne
London School of Economics and Political Science

Originally from Bulgaria, I moved to the UK six years ago when I was awarded the HMC scholarship to study at a British boarding school – Dollar Academy. I first became interested in the clinical neurosciences last summer during my research experience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where I worked on a mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and on advancing some of the current tools available for gene therapy. My interests were further developed through my dissertation project which I am about to finish as part of my undergraduate degree at Edinburgh University, in which I characterised some of the major pathological changes in a novel mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Today I look forward to starting my PhD degree in Prof. James Fawcett’s laboratory in Cambridge where I will be exploring what goes wrong inside nerve cells upon spinal cord injury and will hopefully be able to design new strategies to repair the damage. My ultimate aim is to enhance the understanding of the neurodegenerative and regenerative processes in the brain and to provide improvements to the diagnosis, treatment and quality of life of the affected individuals and their families. I am also passionate about scientific communication and I have been involved in writing for the Science and Environment section of the Student newspaper over the past few years. I hope that as a Gates scholar, I will be able to reach out to communities and bridge the gap between scientists and the public.

Previous Education

The University of Edinburgh

I was born and raised in Bistrița, a little medieval town in northern Transylvania. Fortunately, the town did not get stuck to how it was immortalised in the first chapter of Dracula, as I had the chance to learn from a brilliant cohort of science teachers. They encouraged me to go to various olympiads, a common experience in Eastern Europe, where I have made many long-lasting friendships. Students that had already gone abroad to study encouraged us to follow. That is how I got to do my M. Sci in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in Chemistry. Throughout the summers I have worked on Chiral Covalent Organic Frameworks at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, and Tetra-Aniline Spindle-Structured Cages in Prof. Nitschke’s group in Cambridge, to cement my synthetic skills. Currently, I am working on Chiral Conjugated Polymers in Prof. Bronstein's group, to understand what modulates the chiral response in such compounds. Pursuing a PhD in Nanoscience would provide the best framework to enrich my scientific toolkit, by interacting and engaging with academics from physics, engineering, and material science. Global warming is a multifaced problem, and it does require interdisciplinary solutions.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Natural Sciences 2023

I graduated from the University of Magdeburg with a degree in Psychology. Subsequently I worked in a forensic psychiatric hospital for two years and started my further professional education in legal psychology before coming to Cambridge. Last year I started a Master’s programme in Criminology, followed by a PhD. I am especially interested in eyewitness psychology and ways to improve witness performance of older adult witnesses. During my PhD I will look at a new investigative interviewing technique and will conduct a series of experiments with older adults. In future, I hope to contribute to German and international investigative interviewing and help minimize wrongful convictions. After finishing my further professional education I also intend to work for law courts as a chartered forensic psychologist and furthermore, provide training for judges and lawyers concerning the psychological and psychiatric overlap with the legal system.