Three L&S Students Win Gates Cambridge Scholarships

By Genevieve Shiffrar, February 28, 2003

Undergraduate students Aidan Craig and Kate Marvel and graduate student Simon Grote have won Gates Cambridge Scholarships, allowing them to earn graduate degrees at Cambridge University in England.

According to Alicia Hayes, coordinator of the Scholarship Connection, "the Gates Cambridge Scholarship is extremely prestigious—it is on par with the Rhodes. Students who receive this award attend Cambridge University while students with Rhodes scholarships enroll at Oxford University. The scholarship provides students with University and College fees, a maintenance allowance sufficient for a single student, a further discretionary allowance, and one return economy airfare." While the exact amount varies, this award is generous, averaging approximately $32, 000 a year. 

Both undergraduate awardees will focus their studies in physics.

Aidan Craig, a senior majoring in Physics and minoring in Philosophy, says he was "apoplectic with joy" upon learning that he won the Gates Cambridge. With multi-year funding, he plans to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Cambridge. He'll specialize in condensed matter physics, which for him has a dual attraction. Condensed matter physics has "the same mathematical rigor and beauty of other branches of physics. Yet, it deals with the properties of materials, so it is also very tangible and accessible to experimentation and application."

At Cambridge, Craig will be a member of Eugene Terentjev's laboratory, which specializes in polymers that change shape under certain temperatures. Craig will likely take up the study of theoretical aspects of these polymers.

Kate Marvel, a double major in Astrophysics and Physics, will earn a master's degree in the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department at Cambridge before returning to the US to pursue a Ph.D. She hopes to combine cosmology with particle physics to help shed light on the origins of the Universe. She explains that "cosmology is concerned with the large issues—the nature of the Universe—while particle physics deals with the small stuff. These two fields meet at the beginning of the Universe, in the first three minutes following the Big Bang."

Marvel is quick to express her gratitude for the support she received throughout the long application process from many people, including her research advisor George Smoot, Astronomy Department Chair Donald Backer, as well as other students and her friends.

Applicants to the Gates Cambridge Scholarship program are asked why they would like to attend Cambridge University in particular. For both Craig and Marvel, the answer was easy: the quality and history of physics research at Cambridge. According to Marvel, "Cambridge is a major center of theoretical physics. Many great theoretical physicists have been at Cambridge, from Newton to Maxwell to Hawking. The curriculum also is incredible. You select the areas on which you want to be examined, but you are free to attend any classes from a vast array of options."

Graduate student Simon Grote of the History Department also received the Gates Cambridge. He hopes to pursue at Cambridge a project allowing him to combine his current interests in the intellectual history of late antiquity with 17th and 18th century intellectual history. Grote will enroll in a one-year master's program in Political Thought and Intellectual History.

For Grote, a particularly compelling aspect of this degree program is the way in which its members contribute to contemporary civic debate. He notes, "For the past few decades, a large and active community of scholars producing research on intellectual history at Cambridge has been stimulating and helping to formulate debates over political and economic theory throughout the English-speaking world."

The opportunity to study at Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar is relatively new. The scholarships were established only three years ago by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In the words of Dr. Gordon Johnson, Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, the program aims "...to create a network of future leaders from around the world who will bring new vision and commitment to effecting change and addressing global problems."

Given that only 42 scholarships were awarded this year, it is especially impressive that three recipients hail from Berkeley. In fact, students have represented Berkeley and the College of Letters & Science well in the short history of the scholarship program, having received a total of five awards. In 2000-2001, Anthropology major Rachel Giraudo and History major Julie Pham received Gates Cambridge Scholarships. This year, Aidan Craig, Kate Marvel and Simon Grote continue the young tradition of Berkeley students attending Cambridge as Gates Cambridge Scholars. Many congratulations to these exceptional individuals!