Directory

Dr Francisco-José Quintana is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He also serves as Associate Editor at the European Journal of International Law. Francisco is a legal scholar interested in the politics, history, and theory of international law and global governance. His current research studies the potential of employing regional frameworks as leverage for international legal change in the interests of the Global South. This project builds on his doctoral research on the history of human rights in Latin American international legal thought, which he is developing into a book.

Francisco’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in multiple edited volumes and journals including the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, and the Journal of the History of International Law. He has recently co-edited the special issue ‘Bogotá at 75’, forthcoming in the Journal of the History of International Law (2024).

Francisco holds a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge (approved without corrections), an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (where he obtained two Dean’s Scholar prizes), an LLM in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (with distinction), and a Degree in Law (Abogacía) from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT). He was previously a Research Associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a fixed-term Lecturer at UTDT, and has also taught at other universities including Cambridge. Francisco has been a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Chevening Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and a De Fortabat Fellow.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science
Harvard University

I work in the domain of smart phone based sensing systems. Modern mobile phones are equipped with many sensors like accelerometer, camera, GPS, microphone etc. and they can be used to capture various details about users automatically like accelerometer can be used to infer activity, Bluetooth to detect colocation, GPS to infer location, microphone to infer speech/noise. Mobile phone based sensing systems find applications in many domains such as social psychology, health care, and navigation systems. However, since mobile phones are battery-powered, continuous sensing from the sensors leads to faster depletion of the phone battery. My research is on energy efficiency of the smart phone based sensing systems.

p bio

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MSc Natural Science, BS Natural Science 2002

Links

http://them
http://me

After growing up in the small town of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, I am now graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. During my undergraduate career I became increasingly interested in the problem of antibiotic resistance, leading to my current undergraduate research on novel antibiotics for the treatment of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This experience inspired me to pursue research in the field of structural biology which focuses on determining the molecular structures that underlie the living world. I am fascinated by the powerful techniques of this field and how they can be used to understand fundamental biological processes. I hope to one day use the knowledge and skills that I learn at Cambridge to answer important questions about the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. It is an honor to receive this scholarship and to have the opportunity to become part of the Cambridge community. I could not have done so without the help and support from my family, friends, peers, and professors along the way.

Previous Education

Pennsylvania State University

I am a passionate researcher in synthetic biology and nanomedicine, committed to bridging the gap between scientific innovation and global health equity. After earning my undergraduate degree from NYU Abu Dhabi and completing my masters at UCL, I now pursue a DPhil in Chemimcal Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge, where I am engineering synthetic cells that can be externally triggered to produce and release therapeutic peptides for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases. These programmable systems offer a promising step toward smart, responsive nanomedicine. As a Syrian and child of expatriates, I have seen how conflict and displacement leave communities without access to even the most basic care. This reality drives my mission to translate cutting-edge biotechnology into accessible therapies that reach those most in need. Beyond the lab, I mentor emerging scientists, lead educational workshops, and advocate for women’s representation in STEM. I am the first Gates Scholar to emerge from NYU Abu Dhabi, and I hope to pave the way for more women to lead and innovate at the frontiers of science.

Previous Education

New York University Abu Dhabi Chemistry
University College London Nanotechnology & Regen Medicin

I have grown up in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi but spent most of my childhood moving around to different cities and countries. These experiences heightened my awareness of how identity markers shift in salience and function in different socio-cultural contexts. I explored these issues with a broad liberal arts bachelor’s degree at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and then received the Fulbright Master’s scholarship to pursue further studies in psychology at Columbia University. I continued exploring the interplay of culture, identity and intergroup relations by researching about these topics in my courses; by becoming a resident of International House; and by interning at the UN with the American Psychological Association. Over the last three years, I have been teaching undergraduates in Lahore at Forman Christian College (A Chartered University) and LUMS. I’ve taught, researched, presented on, and discussed with students and colleagues the complex interaction of Pakistani identities and intergroup conflict. I am honoured and excited by this opportunity provided by the prestigious Gates scholarship to research how our identities interact with interpersonal and socio-political events and conflicts. At Cambridge, I will pursue my M.Phil. in social anthropology. Thereafter, I plan to continue to work for a doctorate. My major motivation is to use my knowledge to promote identity processes that reduce inter-group bias and conflict.

Previous Education

Lahore University of Management Sciences
Columbia University Teachers College

Though I was born in Bangladesh, my family moved to Canada when I was three years old. I grew up using stories to puzzle out my place in the world. My love of classics began in my high school Latin class, and in completing my BA in Classics and History at McGill, I gained greater critical perspectives and practical skills. I took part in an archaeological dig in Southern Italy, and adapted and directed a play from Ancient Greek into English. I learned that studying the ancient world could be done in an outward facing way and learned to share these stories with a wider community. I also worked with youth engagement in politics confronting the barriers to democratic participation for young people. To find solutions, I turned to the ancient world and became interested in the lives of adolescents in a world where their roles in society were much less clearly defined, and yet parallel to our own in their liminality. In classics, I seek to understand the voices that have gone unheard for too long- youth, women, the working classes. All these intersecting identities have deep ties to my own story. I believe that better understanding the ancient world might give us the critical vocabulary to solve problems in our modern age as well.

Previous Education

McGill University Classics 2020

With a background in Socio-Economics and Gender Studies, I began my career with a firm commitment to challenging the dominance of neoclassical mainstream economics in Vienna and London. With my most recent role at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose having been embedded in the context of Western European climate politics, I observed how dominant economic imaginaries are often positioned as objective common sense, excluding alternative viewpoints. Decolonial perspectives, in particular, remain significantly underrepresented and subordinated to national economic interests. During my Politics and International Studies PhD, I seek to investigate the barriers to a more pluralist engagement with the economics of climate change in Western European electoral politics. I intend to explore which economic imaginaries become side-lined and how this exclusion occurs. By focusing on decolonial economics, I hope to contribute to the decolonisation of national political economies, without which the green transition in Western Europe risks perpetuating inequalities at the expense of Global South countries.

Previous Education

London School of Economics & Political Science (Un Gender (Sexuality) 2021
Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien (Vienna Univ of Ec & B Economics and Socio-Economics 2020

Originally from Lexington, MA, I completed my BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford in 2007. I am doing a PhD in Biological Anthropology with Dr Toomas Kivisild. My work involves investigating the distribution of type 2 diabetes and obesity associated genetic loci among ethnic groups within India.

Towfique Raj, Ph.D., is a core faculty member in the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Genetics and Genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Raj is a Co-Director of Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Genomics Core Dr. Raj received his Ph.D. in genetics from Cambridge University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Raj was an instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Raj received the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Service Award and the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer's Disease Award.

His research group uses powerful computational and experimental tools for genetic research and interdisciplinary approaches to understand the genetic factors driving neurodegenerative diseases with the ultimate goal of finding a cure. More recently, Dr. Raj's group is interested in linking genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease to detectable changes in innate immune cells that may contribute to disease progression. A major direction of his laboratory has been to understand the role of peripheral immune cells in neurodegenerative disease pathogenesis (see the MyND study). His group is leading efforts to set up human cohorts for deep multi-omics profiling of immune cells. His long-term interest is to translate findings from these studies to potentially identify novel immune therapeutic targets and biomarkers.

Links

https://rajlab.org
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21115973

My main academic interests have led me to the Development Studies MPhil at Cambridge, which I finished in 2010. Being at Cambridge, and being a Gates Scholar. was, without exaggeration, one of the best experiences in my life. Once I finished my MPhil, I took a year off. I have now started PhD, at the Development Studies Centre, under the supervision of Dr Ha-Joon Chang. In my PhD, I will explore the political economy of state dissolution. This topic started off from my interest in former Yugoslavia, for which I hold that the "ethnic-hatred" and similar explanations for its dissolution are woefully inadequate. I wish to see whether political economy plays a far greater, but much less explored, role in the process of state dissolution (not only in the case of Yugoslavia). I consider myself a heterodox economist, and, besides my PhD, I also wish to use my time at Cambridge to do what I can to further reform in the economics academia.

In 2007 the Gates Scholarship allowed me to leave the practice of law to study International Relations at Cambridge. My MPhil dissertation drew on my experience of working on the Saddam Hussein trial in 2005 and examined the use of Joint Criminal Enterprise Liability in the Iraqi High Tribunal. My PhD research then explored the legal twilight surrounding the private military and security industry and allowed me to gain the expertise to become one of the leading experts on matters relating to the regulation, governance and oversight of private security companies. After graduating, I established I.R. Consilium, first as a UK company, and now as a US company, through which we provide advice and assistance on issues of international affairs, particularly at the intersection of law and security. In recent years, I was also: a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council where I led the largest study ever published on downstream oil theft and related hydrocarbons crime; an Adjunct Professor of Maritime Law and Security at the US Department of Defense's Africa Center for Strategic Studies; a Maritime Crime Expert for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Maritime Crime Programme; and a "Key Opinion Former on Maritime Security" at NATO. More recently, I became president of Auxilium Worldwide, a charitable organization that works around the world on projects and programs in furtherance of global harmony.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge MPhil International Relations; PhD Politics & International Studies 2011
College of William and Mary Juris Doctor (Law) 2005
University of Maryland (Baltimore County) BA Modern Languages & Linguistics; MA Intercutrual Communication 2002

Links

http://irconsilium.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianralby

My PhD research focuses on "future" city discourses in Indian urban renewal projects and the implications for urban citizenship and identity. My particular interest is people displaced by the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi -- through the lives of mobile migrant workers, I will explore notions of home, belonging, and future imaginaries.

My PhD research in Cambridge University will add value to the research that I have carried out during my MS at IIT Madras. This will enable me to understand and use technological innovation in various infrastructure projects specifically projects related to Structural Engineering. Such knowledge will undoubtedly help me and my country to realise the vision of making a developing country like India into a developed country. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Gates Cambridge Trust.