3 South Asian Americans Among ‘Academically Outstanding, Socially Committed’ Gates Cambridge Scholars
- They will join around 50 scholars from other parts of the world to be part of the Class of 2024.
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 human decision-making under uncertainty— a subject he’ll continue studying while at Cambridge.
MIT senior Sadhana Lolla is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue an M.Phil in technology policy. She was inspired to to pursue artificial intelligence solutions that bring robotic assistive technology to underprivileged communities after seeing her grandmother labor endlessly without assistive technology, she told Gates Cambridge. Outside of research, “she leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally,” Gates Cambridge says. She is an instructor for class 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world, which reaches millions of students annually. She serves as the curriculum lead for Momentum AI, the only U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved students for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in Northern Scotland as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program. She was also the director for xFair, MIT’s largest student-run career fair, and is an executive board member for Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible for students across musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crossword puzzles, and baking.
North Carolina native Arman Kassam pursued a BA in history at Stanford University. Most of his “historical work focused on the intersection of early modern science and colonial ventures,” according to his Gates Cambridge profile. “But some time away from college working in the labor movement and studying the housing crisis refocused my attention,” he says. At Cambridge, he will be studying the confluence of two major social trends: the recent rise of short-term gig work, and the decades-long increase in the number of unhoused people owing to rising housing costs, stagnating wages, and austerity measures. He plans on conducting field work that sheds light on unhoused labor in the UK, its representation in popular media, and its connection to changes in the welfare state. “Ultimately, I’m interested in studying the long-term history of economic exploitation through the interaction of housing and labor markets. I believe there is no well-functioning democracy that does not ensure housing for all.”