Four Stanford students win 2019 Gates Cambridge Scholarships

Three seniors and a medical student are among the 34 Americans awarded scholarships to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in England.

Four Stanford students, including three seniors and a medical student, have been awarded 2019 Gates Cambridge Scholarships to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in England.

They are among the 34 Americans who were recently awarded scholarships by the Gates Cambridge Trust during its U.S. selection round. In late March, the organization will interview candidates from all other countries and offer 60 more scholarships.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established the Gates Cambridge Scholarships in 2000 to enable outstanding students from outside the United Kingdom to pursue full-time graduate studies in any subject at the University of Cambridge. The program aims to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

Four Stanford students have received Gates Cambridge Scholarships:


Dylan Griswold (Image credit: Courtesy Dylan Griswold)

Dylan Griswold, 26, of Monson, Massachusetts, is a third-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine.

Griswold will attend Cambridge for the next three years to earn a doctorate in clinical neurosciences with a focus on neurosurgery. After earning a PhD, he will return to Stanford to complete the MD Program.

After completing a residency in neurosurgery, Griswold plans to pursue a career working with international governing bodies, such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization, as well as ministries of health, community leaders and local health care to improve treatment of brain injuries in settings where resources are scarce.

During the 2017-18 academic year, Griswold served as a co-leader of the Organization for Global Health, which is composed of students interested in increasing awareness of international health issues through educating at home and assisting abroad.

Griswold is a co-author of articles published in Operative Neurosurgery, World Neurosurgery and the Journal of Neurosurgery. In November 2017, The Lancet Neurology published “Traumatic Brain Injury: A Global Challenge,” which Griswold co-authored with Dr. Walter D. Johnson, director of the World Health Organization Programme for Emergency and Essential Surgical Care.


Mika Sarkin Jain, 21, who grew up in New York City, is a senior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physics with honors in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a master’s degree in computer science in the School of Engineering.

At Cambridge, Jain will pursue a master of philosophy degree in biological science at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he will use a combination of experimental and computational approaches to study the genetic basis of complex disease.

Jain believes that integrating new experimental and computational methods will lead not only to fundamental advances in biology but also to more informative diagnostics, more targeted treatments and more accessible health care.

At Stanford, Jain was awarded a 2018 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and a Stanford Bio-X Undergraduate Fellowship. He won the David S. Levin Award, which is presented annually to the member of the junior class who is judged to be the most outstanding physics student on the basis of academic breadth and demonstrated abilities in experimental physics.

Jain is the first author and co-author of several conference papers and journal articles, and has won two conference awards.


Kiran Sridhar (Image credit: Courtesy Kiran Sridhar)

Kiran Sridhar, 21, of Woodside, California, is a senior and an honors student in economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is writing an honors thesis, “Hacking for Good: Leveraging HackerOne Data to Develop an Economic Model of Bug Bounties.”

At Cambridge, Sridhar will pursue a master of philosophy degree in strategy, management and operations at Judge Business School.

At Stanford, Sridhar was a student member of the Committee on Globalization of the Stanford University Board of Trustees from September 2017 to June 2018. He served as a course designer and teaching assistant for the 2016 online course Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today, taught by professor emeritus and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry.

Sridhar is the founder and executive director of Waste No Food, which enables farms, restaurants, cafeterias and grocery stores to post notifications of excess food on a website, where it can be secured by local aid groups that pick up the food and deliver it to people in need.

He recently won a 2020 Schwarzman Scholarship for graduate study at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. He plans to attend Cambridge in 2020, after earning a master’s degree at Tsinghua.


Jonathan Wang (Image credit: Courtesy Jonathan Wang)

Jonathan X. Wang, 22, of Roseville, Minnesota, is a senior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computational biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a master’s degree in biomedical informatics in the Stanford School of Medicine.

At Cambridge, Wang will pursue a doctorate in computer science.

At Stanford, Wang is a research assistant in the Health Rex Labs at the School of Medicine, where he is developing a neural network clinical order decision support system. He is a co-author of “Neural Networks for Clinical Order Decision Support,” which was accepted for publication by the American Medical Informatics Association Summit 2019.

Wang is a research assistant in the Graves Lab, which is focused on applications of emerging functional and molecular imaging techniques in radiation therapy of cancer. Wang, who is studying the role of macrophages in circulating tumor cell recruitment following irradiation in vivo and in vitro, was awarded $13,000 in grants for the research by Stanford’s Major Grant Program and Stanford Bio-X.

Wang is the founder of Stanford Undergraduate Hospice and Palliative Care, a program of the Haas Center for Public Service that provides opportunities for students to become certified hospice volunteers and work individually with hospice patients. As a freshman, he cofounded the Golden Gate Science Olympiad, a joint project of students at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

International scholarships

Stanford students interested in overseas scholarships and Stanford faculty interested in nominating students for such awards should contact Diane Murk, manager of the Overseas Resource Center, at dmurk@stanford.edu, or John Pearson, director emeritus of the Bechtel International Center, at john.pearson@stanford.edu.