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3 Indians selected for Gates scholarship at Cambridge
The 55 recipients come from 30 countries and include the first scholar from Rwanda. They represent 68 universities and will study in 39 departments at Cambridge.
Three Indians are among 55 scholars selected for the prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship for postgraduate courses at the University of Cambridge starting later this year, the varsity said on Tuesday.
They are journalist Sagnik Dutta, Sampurna Chakrabarti and Malavika Nair.
The 55 recipients come from 30 countries and include the first scholar from Rwanda. They represent 68 universities and will study in 39 departments at Cambridge.
Women outnumber men by a ratio of 36 to 19, the university said. Forty-one will pursue a PhD and 14 a one-year MPhil.
Chakrabarti will do a PhD in pharmacology. She graduates in May 2016 with a BS in biological sciences and BA in psychology from The State University of New York at Buffalo, US. For her PhD, she will study drug targets for arthritic pain in the lab of Ewan St John Smith at the department of pharmacology.
She said: “My research will help understand arthritis and pain pathologies that affect millions of people worldwide.”
Dutta will do a PhD in politics and international studies. He has been a journalist in India for about six years, during which he witnessed a period of upheaval in the polity and economy.
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For his PhD thesis, he will look at the relationship between religion and constitutionalism in the context of Muslim personal law reform in India. He plans to combine a discourse analysis of the judgments of the Supreme Court with an ethnographic study of Shariah courts run by women in Mumbai to examine the discursive constitution of religion and a liberal rights regime.
Nair will do a PhD in materials science. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in materials science and metallurgy at the University of Cambridge, where she focused on biomedical materials.
She said: “By combining experimental and computational techniques, my research aims to probe the architectural cues that will enable us to successfully obtain cellular selectivity in three dimensional environments for tissue regeneration.”
