In the last of our impact series, we look at the lasting impact Scholars are having in the field of health, from mental and physical health and policy to preventive approaches.
Health is a huge focus of many Gates Cambridge Scholars, whether directly for those studying medical-related subjects or access to health services, or indirectly as there are so many multi-layered factors that impact health, from diet to social inequality.
Here we look at just some of the Scholars whose work is making a difference in fields ranging from climate health and mental health to drug development, health-related policy and AI. Health is affected by multi-layered social issues, including conflict, funding cuts and unequal access to care. Gates Cambridge Scholars are working in all these areas and more to urgently address the problems facing the world.
Climate change
According to the World Health Organization, climate change is now one of the biggest threats to health. Kim van Daalen [2018, pictured right] is an environmental epidemiologist and British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence Career Development Fellow at the Department of Public Health & Primary Care at Cambridge. She is committed to creating equitable scientific evidence to help reduce the adverse impacts of environmental stressors and climate hazards on the health of all populations. During her PhD she played a key role in establishing the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change in Europe, a research collaboration that tracks the connection between climate change and public health in Europe.
She then spent two years as a postdoc at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center where she focused on climate change, infectious disease and gender inequities and where she was awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona 2024 prize in the category of Environmental and Earth Sciences. Alongside her research, she has worked with policymakers and multilateral organisations, such as the World Bank and World Health Organization, to write several technical, policy or guidance reports; has participated in high-level political meetings, including COP, and has contributed to multiple book chapters.
Ramit Debnath [2018], Assistant Professor and inaugural Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge, works on computational social sciences, climate action, socio-technical design, responsible AI design and social decision-making. A co-founder of the ClimaTRACES lab which brings different disciplines together to tackle climate change, he has published on issues including how climate change-induced heatwaves have left Indians more vulnerable to public health issues, shortages of food staples and increased risks of death. The study, published in 2023, included the first ‘heat index’, which measures how hot the human body feels relative to surrounding conditions when humidity and air temperature are added together.
Mental health
When it comes to mental health, Usama Mirza [2022] is addressing one particular gap in mental health provision in Pakistan through the launch of Asia’s first mental health ambulance.
The Embrace Mental Health Initiative is run by Saving 9, a social enterprise that Usama launched. Saving 9, offers medical training, consultancy and sustainable emergency medical response systems to empower communities with inadequate access to healthcare services. The organisation began working in a rural community in Islamabad where there was widespread illiteracy. It was forced to innovate as a result and worked with local commercial drivers launching a community-run Maseeha Ambulance system.
Soon after the initial success of piloting the service, it was found that there was a strong need for female medical emergency responders as, due to local cultural values, female patients were reluctant to be treated and transported by men. This led to the launch of a women-led and run ambulance system for the community, with housewives and school teachers being trained by Saving 9 as medical first responders.
The mental health ambulance service was set up in Islamabad in the aftermath of Covid, following a model pioneered by Sweden. Saving 9 also developed online counselling and a referral service alongside its emergency care provision. It brought in international psychology experts and worked carefully with them and with stakeholders to develop quality training, create an ethical service and build relationships with mental health institutions.
Since it started two years ago, total mental health cases – including both in-person emergency response and online/phone based counselling interventions, jumped from 223 in 2023–2024 to 639 in 2024-2025. Usama says: “These numbers reflect more than just growth, they demonstrate a public shift toward trusting and relying on ethical, responsive mental health services that are free of financial and geographical barriers.”
This year there are plans to expand the service to Lahore, one of Pakistan’s most populous cities, where demand is high.
Other Scholars with a focus on direct interventions for mental health include Raliza Stoyanova [2007]. She is Executive Director of the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders where she leads a team focused on increasing and accelerating the impact of mental health research funding. They convene stakeholders across the sector, provide unique resources and intelligence to inform strategy-setting and celebrate research success. Prior to this role, Raliza was Portfolio Developer/Head of Neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust. She is also Chair of the Advisory Council of the Being Initiative, a global mental health initiative envisioning a world where young people feel well and thrive, and is on the Advisory Board of the Connecting Climate Minds project, which aims to align research and action at the intersection of climate change and mental health.
Richard Dear [2021] has been working on the way mental illness is treated. Richard aims to uncover the biological mechanisms of mental illness by applying his data science skills to large genomic and neuroimaging datasets. He is excited to have finally pinned down his precise research question, which he says is: “Why do symptoms of schizophrenia and depression appear so specifically in adolescence?”
Following the publication of his first-author paper in Nature Neuroscience, Richard co-organised the inaugural Cambridge Psychedelic Research Day, which brought together leading researchers and clinicians in the emerging space of psychedelic treatments for mental health and has sparked potential academia-industry collaborations. As he approaches the end of his PhD, Richard has been selected as one of Cambridge’s nominees for the Schmidt Science Fellowship.
Several Scholars have tackled mental health stigma as part of their studies.
At Cambridge, Sabrina Anjara [2014], who is now Research Principal in Accenture’s Human+AI Impact Initiative, explored the treatment gap for mental health issues, caused by a lack of mental health professionals and affordable mental health services in low resource settings like Indonesia – the focus of her PhD – and the social stigma attached to seeking help. Her research found that patients experiencing mild to moderate mental health issues could be managed effectively by GP practices, although specialist treatment may still prove more cost-effective in the long term. The findings are relevant to countries with a long waiting time for mental health appointments and a growing globalised clientele, as they open up alternative pathways of care. Sabrina trained and worked as a psychologist in Melbourne, London and Singapore before coming to Cambridge.
Meanwhile, Saloni Atal’s PhD addressed the mental health of women in low-income settings in India. She found that women’s mental health is affected both by everyday issues and by gender-related stressors, particularly around motherhood, poverty and domestic conflict. She called for research into women’s mental health in low-income settings to be more attuned to gendered forms of marginalisation. Saloni [2017] worked until recently for policy research and advisory organisation Artha Global as a manager to address complex development challenges in technology, climate and health in India, including climate health.
Scholar-Elect Sarah Borges’ work focuses on the intersection between psychological science and public health, particularly on understanding how young people access mental health services and whether those services are effective. Having begun her university career in medicine in Brazil, Sarah [2025 ] has since gravitated towards Psychology at Harvard, where she has been exploring the impact of social stigma on take-up of mental health services. Her PhD will examine whether mental health services for young people in Brazil are effective. “There is an urgent need for rigorous data on this question, especially in low- and middle-income countries,” she says, adding that, despite comprising 90% of the world’s youth population, these countries represent only about 4% of psychological study samples.
Disease
Many scholars are focused on research into particular diseases, such as cancer or AIDS. They include Florence Nabwire [2013] whose PhD and postdoctoral research focused on the influence of diet, nutrition and HIV status during pregnancy and lactation on bone health in African women and their children, with the aim of understanding the need for maternal calcium and vitamin D supplementation in the context of HIV. She is now the King’s Fellow in Public Health Nutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa supported by the Brighter Living Foundation. She says: “Undernutrition is a long-standing public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa and overnutrition is an emerging issue especially in urban areas. To develop innovative strategies for addressing this growing double burden of malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, there is a need to understand not only what people eat but also how they eat, and the drivers of food choice in each context. ‘Without good data, we’re flying blind’, said Kofi Annan.”
Cancer has been a focus on many scholars’ research. Ping Lin Yeap’s PhD in Oncology [2023] draws on data from Cambridge and his home country of Singapore and applies computational methods to enhance CT scans taken during cancer treatment. This enables a more accurate determination of the delivered dose to individual patients and allows for side effects to be minimised, promoting a more personalised approach to cancer treatment.
Benjamin Chin-Yee’s PhD [2022, pictured left] studied communication and precision cancer treatment, taking a critical approach to a field that can be surrounded by hype. He interrogated what precision therapies are and how doctors can communicate with patients about them and engage them in shared decision-making. He says: “It’s easy to be seduced by shiny new advances in cancer medicine and to hope they will translate into improvements in patient care, but there is a need for a critical dialogue about what is novel and what is impactful.”
Meanwhile, Chandler Robinson [2009] and Dr Anand Jeyasekharan [2004] have been working on a drug that has the potential to replace one of the most widely used cancer drugs around the world. The molecule, known as MNPR-202, is a novel advance on Doxoubicin, which is used in over a million cancer patients each year.
Anand runs a scientific lab and, as a doctor, treats cancer patients at the National University of Singapore Hospital. He is a leading expert on how the immune system recognises cancer cells upon treatment with DNA-damaging chemotherapy, such as Doxorubicin.
Chandler is co-founder and CEO of the cancer-focused biotech company Monopar Therapeutics Inc. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship helped enable the development of his first drug, which is for use to combat the rare genetic disorder Wilson Disease.
Health access
Some Scholars are focused on tackling issues of health inequity and access to medication at the global scale.
Liz Dzeng’s research on end of life has, for instance, focuses on the impact of structural inequalities on older Black adults requiring end-of-life care in the UK and US.
Liz [2007] is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute at the King’s College London, an Associate Professor of Medicine and Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health.
Meanwhile, Victor Roy [2009] combines hands-on practice as a physician with a more policy-related role investigating how political and economic forces shape access to health and care. In 2023, he published Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (University of California Press, available open-access). The book traces how financial logics and actors influenced drug pricing and access to curative hepatitis C medicines. It won an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Alice Amsden Best Book Award from the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
Victor has since extended his analysis of financial sector influences in US health with co-authors in a New England Journal of Medicine article on “The Financialisation of Health in the United States”. With collaborators at the New School, he is now working on building the Health and Political Economy Project. He says the aim is “to shift the paradigm and build power for a more just and inclusive economy that enables health and dignity”. Victor is also an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania.
Old and young
Gates Cambridge Scholars have sought to improve the health of both the youngest and oldest members of the population.
Dr John Clark [pictured right] is currently working as a paediatrics fellow at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Last year, he pursued his interest in becoming a paediatric intensive care consultant and was accepted on to the College of Intensive Care Medicine paediatric training programme.
John [2019] works in a number of areas in paediatric intensive care, including the critical care retrieval service ‘PIPER’ [Paediatric Infant Perinatal Emergency Retrieval]. His work with highly skilled nurses and paramedics aims to stabilise very sick children in suburban, rural and remote settings and bring them to intensive care units in Melbourne. He says: “We take much of the equipment you would find in an ICU on board including a ventilator, infusion pumps (lots) and ultrasound machine, and many bags of drugs and equipment. We travel by road ambulance, fixed wing aeroplane or helicopter.”
His hospital is a busy centre for transplantation and provides ‘heart lung’ machines to keep children alive.
Aditi Vedi [2015] is a Consultant Paediatric Oncologist and Clinical Trialist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, treating children with a range of childhood malignancies, with a special interest in Leukaemia and Neuroblastoma. She is also the National Institute of Health and Care Research, Clinical Research Network lead for paediatric oncology for the East of England; paediatric lead of the Cambridge Experimental Cancer Medicines Centre and Cambridge lead for the Innovative Therapies for Children with Cancer consortium. Aditi leads a number of translational research projects, including a novel combination to induce differentiation in neuroblastoma and expedite whole genome sequencing results for childhood cancer, and is the lead examiner for paediatric clinical examinations for the University of Cambridge’s School of Clinical Medicine.
Scholars are also involved at the other end of the age spectrum, with several researching Alzheimer’s Disease, for instance. They include Julie Qiaojin Lin [2013], an assistant professor in the Bioscience and Biomedical Engineering Thrust, Systems Hub, and in the Brain and Intelligence Research Institute at HKUST in Hong Kong. Julie previously worked for the UK Dementia Research Institute (DRI) where she was named a UK DRI Emerging Leader.
Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms governing neuronal RNA metabolism, including RNA splicing, localisation and mRNA translation, with an emphasis on how these interconnected processes sustain axonal and synaptic function and promote neuronal survival. Through combining technological innovation and neurobiological research, her team seeks to uncover molecular insights that could pave the way for neuron-targeted therapies addressing neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, including Frontotemporal Dementia.
Scholars have also done important work on women’s health worldwide, contributing both in international organisations and through policy analysis.
Global health
Many scholars take a global approach to health. Johanna Riha [2011] is Research Lead for the Gender Equality and Intersectionality work package at the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health in Malaysia. An epidemiologist with over 13 years of experience in global health policy and research, her technical expertise spans areas including sexual and reproductive health and rights, human resources for health, non-communicable diseases, gender integration in health programmes and policies, social determinants of health, health equity and feminist leadership.
After leaving Cambridge, she took a job as policy director of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Public Health and then completed a project on how SMS and radio messages could reduce the impact of cholera in Somalia. The one-year project involved splitting her time between Nairobi and Cambridge. The aim was to encourage a more two-way approach to the use of radio in certain public health emergencies to understand community views, perceptions and concerns while also collecting basic socio-demographic data from participants via SMS. After that she was involved in short-term consultancy work in Africa before moving to Malaysia.
Other Scholars work on health inequity from a broader policy perspective or in terms of access to medication.
Georgina Murphy [2009] is a Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation whose work draws on her background in molecular medicine, epidemiology, health systems and public-private partnerships. For her PhD she led a research project on non-communicable diseases in rural Uganda.
Georgina’s current work focuses on the use of data analytics and modeling to better inform public health decision-making and to advance understanding of the burden of disease at global, regional and local levels, in order to support prioritisation and planning.
Georgina leads large-scale programmes and initiatives to strengthen the use of modeling in Africa and Asia for disease surveillance and epidemic preparedness and response, working closely with national governments, multilateral organisations, global experts and the private sector.
Rachel Silverman [2013] focuses more on the policy side of global health. She is a policy analyst at the Centre for Global Development [CGD], working on global health financing and incentive structures. During previous work at the Centre from 2011 to 2013, she contributed to research and analysis on value for money and measurement in global health, among other topics. Before joining CGD, Silverman spent two years supporting democratic strengthening and good governance programmes in Kosovo and throughout Central and Eastern Europe with the National Democratic Institute.
Innovation
Many Scholars are at the forefront of new branches of medical and other sciences, investigating new types of approaches to health prevention, including synthetic biology.
Vitor Pinheiro’s laboratory [2001], for instance, focuses on the development of novel molecular biology tools and in harnessing directed evolution approaches to study and create novel biological systems. The goal is to re-engineer genetic processes using synthetic nucleic acids and developing alternative genetic codes with non-canonical chemical functionalities.
Vijay Kanuru [2006] is an expert in advanced nanomedicine, specialising in the effective management of delocalised cancers and degenerative conditions, with a focus on the discovery, development and deployment of first-in-class nanodrug formulations. His work centres on small-molecule nanoparticles designed as proprietary therapeutic-grade functional nanoceuticals.
He is the founder of ONCOCUR India, a Mumbai-based enterprise that offers clinically validated, patented oncoceutical therapies for various stages of cancer management. He has also been working on nanomedicine in relation to mental health, pollution-related health issues and Covid.
He is currently working on an Onco-AI venture in collaboration with fellow Gates Cambridge alumni and colleagues from Cornell University. Their mission is to develop advanced pharmaco prognosis predictive algorithms capable of forecasting optimal drug combinations and dosage regimens tailored to individual cancer patients – marking what Vijay says is a “a significant step towards truly personalised oncology”.
Professor Alessio Ciulli [2002, pictured left], who recently became the first Gates Cambridge Scholar to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, is the founder and Director of the University of Dundee’s Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD). He is a pioneer of research in targeted protein degradation, a transformative approach in drug discovery which leverages the cell’s natural protein disposal system to remove specific, disease-causing proteins. It is applicable across a broad range of therapeutic areas — including cancer, inflammation, metabolic and neurological disorders.
Other Scholars work at the cutting edge of health and AI.
Andreas Bender [2002] specialises in developing new life science data analysis methods and applying them in drug discovery, chemical biology and in silico drug safety. Since finishing his PhD, he has held roles at various universities and in industry, including Chief Informatics and Technology Officer at Pangea Botanica. He was Professor for AI-Driven Drug Discovery in the Chemistry Department at Cambridge and is currently Visiting Professor for Molecular Informatics. Over the years he has co-founded three drug discovery companies – Healx, Pharmenabletx and Pangebio – which employ around 100 people, and have drugs in clinical phase two of development. Andreas is now working as Professor for Machine Learning at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and setting up a new biotech-based Health Institute.
Stan Wang [2011] is CEO and Founder of Thymmune Therapeutics, a biotechnology company extending healthspan by restoring and maintaining healthy immune function from cradle to grave through thymic regenerative medicine. The company’s platform – powered by machine learning and pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) engineering – generates off-the-shelf thymic cells at scale that can form a new thymus gland, the small organ that makes white blood cells which protect the body against infections. Stan, who was previously founding Chief Scientific Officer at Cellino Biotech, says: “This fuels a pipeline of therapies for cancer, autoimmunity, chronic diseases, transplant tolerance and immune deficiencies.”
For others innovation is about humanising medicine more. Erica Cao [2013] founded and is President of Humans in Harmony which brings communities together through music. It developed from Erica’s project Send a Song, which involved medical students writing songs for children in care and aimed to build empathy in students and self esteem in children. The first pilot of Humans in Harmony was about joining at-risk teens writing for children with cancer. Erica says: “The teens developed enhanced self-esteem, empathy and pro-social behaviour. The children with cancer found the inspiration and hope that music provides.”
Health prevention
Health prevention should perhaps lead this article, given its importance in reducing the occurrence of ill health in the first place and its role as the most economical way of tackling health problems.
Anwesha Lahiri’s PhD in Medical Science at the MRC Epidemiology Unit explored the links between nutrition and cardiometabolic health in South Asians, with a focus on tackling the health data gap when it comes to cardiovascular disease and diabetes which are increasing fast in South Asia. She has published two articles in the Lancet since 2021 and garnered over 600 citations. She has also presented at major international conferences, including the American Heart Association. She was lead analyst on a multi-country collaboration with UNICEF, has run public health workshops in rural India and helped to coordinate an international seminar on diabetes.
Anwesha [2021] says: “Identification of risk factors in East, Southeast and South Asian populations is pivotal for strengthening health systems and disease prevention.”
Meanwhile, Ghufran Al Sayed [2024, pictured right] began her training as a doctor during Covid, but started to question whether the typical career path to a clinical consultant was the only way for her to make a difference in healthcare. In 2021 she got the chance to pursue a master’s in Public Health. She says that if Covid had not happened she would probably not have switched from hospital medicine to public health medicine. Yet it’s a field in which she says she has found ‘so much joy’ because it is still part of medicine, but is focused on helping people before they get sick.
Ghufran is now doing a PhD in Medical Science at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit which seeks to leverage digital solutions to understand and mitigate childhood obesity. More broadly, Ghufran hopes her work will reduce health inequalities, promote adolescent wellbeing and agency in their health and strengthen collaborative networks between change-makers and the wider population.
And she is keen to listen to teenagers about what they need. She says: “You can’t make assumptions if you want to find what works for people and you need to bear in mind that their needs may change with time. I will stop at nothing to help people, but I have to be sure that what I am doing is really helping people.”
*Top picture credit: Apple for Health – Apple with Stethoscope and author Wellness GM via Wikimedia Commons.