Three South Asian Americans — Ishan Kalburg, Sadhana Lolla and Arman Kassam — are among 26 “academically outstanding and socially committed” U.S. citizens selected to be part of the 2024 class of Gates Cambridge Scholars at the University of Cambridge. This year’s scholars come from 20 universities across the United States and beyond, Gates Cambridge says. Nineteen are women, six are men and one would prefer not to specify. Thirteen will pursue Ph.Ds while 13 will undertake one-year master’s degrees.
Established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship provides full funding for around 80 exceptional applicants from countries outside the UK to undertake a postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge.
The U.S. scholars will join around 50 scholars from other parts of the world, who will be announced in early April. The full class of 2024 will join current Gates Cambridge Scholars in October to form a community of around 300 current scholars in residence at University of Cambridge.
Johns Hopkins alum Ishan Kalburge who will pursue a Ph.D in engineering at Cambridge, will look at how the human brain forms internal representations of uncertainty,,” his Gates Cambridge profile says. The initial motivation for his research is a personal one. “When my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, I was driven to deepen my understanding of human cognition to develop solutions that could help people like him,” he says. In addition to conducting neuroeconomics research at Caltech, he is also president of Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering Society. He developed a model to explain why humans sometimes act in bursts. These experiences, he says, “sparked his interest in using computational neuroscience to examine how decision-making is implemented in the brain.” He decided to pursue research at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, modeling…
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