Up and coming Gates scholars will share their research into malaria, housing, sustainable architecture and underdevelopment at their first internal symposium of the academic year next week.

Gates scholarships are awarded to outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom on the basis of a person's intellectual ability, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society.

On Tuesday, four scholars, including one who has just started at the University, will talk about their research:

- Sathish Subramanian will talk about his research on combating malaria in the post-genomic era. He has just started at Cambridge this month to study for an MPhil in Biological Sciences and has already had considerable success in his research, uncovering a novel pathway by which certain parasites metabolize fatty acids. He hopes to look at how this research, which has been submitted to an academic journal, can be used to develop an anti-malaria drug.

- King Mills, a 2007 MPhil student in Development Studies from Ghana, will speak about the search for a solution to underdevelopment.

- Diane Archer, a PhD student in Land Economy from Thailand, will talk about providing secure housing through collective action, based on her fieldwork earlier this year in Bangkok. Her research looks at the implications on social capital of community participation in slum upgrading in Bangkok.

- Gillian Denny, a PhD student in Architecture from the USA, will speak about using allotments to generate a sustainable lifestyle. Her research is into sustainable architecture and she is Student Leader for the Cambridge entry in the Solar Decathlon Europe 2010, a competition for universities to design and build a self-sufficient house using solar power as the only source of energy.

The internal symposia are held once a term and allow scholars from diverse disciplines to share their work with other students. Organised by the Gates Scholars Council which is run by students, they are informal and interactive. The Council holds its AGM this weekend and next month elections will be held for most of the Council posts.

The Council organises a number of events during the academic year, most of which are open to the wider academic community at Cambridge. They include a Distinguished Lecture Series. Confirmed so far for this term are Roger Glass, deputy director of the US National Institutes for Health and head of their international programmes, and Professor Michael Scharf, Director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center and Director of the Cox Center War Crimes Research Office. Professor Scharf served as a member of the elite international team of experts that provided training to the judges and prosecutors of the Iraqi Special Tribunal and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Council also organises social events for scholars, including settling in activities for this year’s 150 new scholars. The last of these events is a black tie cruise up the Thames which will take place on 18th October.

Rachel Pike, outgoing chair of the Gates Scholars Council, says: “The internal symposia are informal and interactive and provide students with a great opportunity to talk about real world issues with up-and-coming experts. All the Council’s activities are designed to bring scholars from different disciplines together to propose solutions to the pressing problems facing the world today. We bring the historical perspective of the humanities, the precision and technology of the sciences, and the creative approach of the arts. Our diversity, both in terms of the disciplines we represent and in terms of our international perspective, is our strength. We have the great opportunity to interact and build relationships with one another, and we have the obligation to apply what we learn from these relationships to our work.”

There are currently around 250 Gates scholars studying at Cambridge and some 828 scholars from 85 different countries have been on the scholarship programme since 2001. The scholarships were established in 2000 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to enable outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at the University.

The internal symposium is on 14th October at 6:00-7:30pm in the Gates room at the University Centre, Mill Lane.
 

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