OURS National Scholarships

Luisa Dell (’23, Chemical Engineering) is passionate about research in synthetic biology, mentorship, and outreach. She is originally from Monterey, CA, where she attended Monterey Peninsula College before transferring to UC Berkeley. At Cambridge, Luisa hopes to overcome contemporary uropathogenic Escherichia coli antibiotic resistance and other bacterial resistance towards UTIs through the discovery of novel alternatives to traditional beta-lactam antibiotics. After earning her PhD, she hopes to continue research projects that will advance global health as well as increase diversity in STEM education.

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Janani Mohan (’19, Political Science) is pursuing a PhD in Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, researching European nuclear & human rights frameworks, after receiving a Master’s in International Policy from Stanford University. She is a policy analyst with a background in technology, development, and security policy for leading think tanks, government, and international organizations. Her experiences include collaborating with the United Nations Innovation Cell to monitor open-source information from the War in Ukraine, consulting with the United Nations Development Programme in South Africa to increase technology access for […]

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Anjali Kantharuban (Computer Science and Linguistics, ’22) will pursue her interest in natural language processing (NLP) and language revitalization at Cambridge by conducting research in Dr. Anna Korhonen’s Language Technology Laboratory. Dr. Korhonen is a key player in the small community of scholars working in the emerging field of natural language processing for low-resource linguistic dialects, so Anjali is honored to be pursuing her M.Phil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics under her mentorship.

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Kayla Brown earned her B.A. in Media Studies from UC Berkeley in 2020. As an undergraduate, she was a research assistant at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. She now works for Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a global business network and non-profit consultancy, on projects related to technology, ethics, and human rights. Kayla will earn an MPhil in Sociology at the University of Cambridge funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust, building upon her work experience as a consultant to research human rights and corporate […]

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Freja Ekman will graduate from U.C. Berkeley in spring 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Biology. Growing up with a close friend with autism, Freja witnessed firsthand the bullying that many people with disabilities experience. This sparked her passion for both genome engineering research and disability advocacy. During her undergraduate studies at Berkeley, her interests further grew as she helped develop CRISPR-Cas9-based gene therapy to treat Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in vivo. However, there currently exists a large disconnect between the development of novel gene therapies in academic […]

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Vineet will graduate from UC Berkeley in Spring 2018 with simultaneousdegrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics and a minor in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences.Although born in India, he spent most of his life in Bahrain and Dubai. This made him aware of the inequalities between oil-rich regions like the Middle East and resource-constrained developing nations, in energy security and access to clean technologies. Thus, he developed a passion for solvingcomplex, multifaceted issues surroundingenergy and environmental sustainability. By engaging in diverse activities ranging from honors research to environmental consulting, he […]

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Margaret graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 2012 with a B.A. in Anthropology. Shethen went on to study for an MPhil at Cambridge and has been recently awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, to pursue a Ph.D. In her own words, “As a child of archaeologists, I was surrounded by material culture and immaterial pasts, but I was also fascinated by politics from an early age. While studying abroad in Moscow and Copenhagen, I became intrigued by uses (and abuses) of the material past in the service of nationalism, which led to […]

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Ritankar Das graduated as the University Medalist in 2013, with a double major in Bioengineering and Chemical Biology. Ritankar received an MSc in biomedical engineering is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. He plans to perform bio-molecular research to find new energy sources at a national research lab after complete the degree. In addition to winning the 2013 Gates-Cambridge Scholarship and Goldwater Scholarship, Ritankar has received numerous other honors, including the National Science Foundation GCI Award, the American Chemical Society National Meeting Award, and […]

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