The Gates Foundation, founded by Bill Gates Senior in 2000, gives postgraduate scholarships to applicants from countries outside the UK in any subject. The criteria for selection include a commitment to improving the lives of others and showing leadership potential. This year the College is pleased to welcome three new Gates Scholars.

Catherine Wagner is already a Corpus member, as she is doing an MPhil in Data Intensive Science. Now she will her pursue her PhD. "My background in Chemical Engineering and my experience as an Operations Manager at Merck sparked my interest in the complex societal factors that determine global access to medicine. Alongside my career, I've volunteered with Purdue University as a guest lecturer, helping equip students in sub-Saharan Africa with the skills to launch localized drug manufacturing. In 2025, supported by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, I began my MPhil in Data Intensive Science to learn to apply statistics and machine learning to complex biological problems. Now, for my PhD in Biostatistics, I aim to integrate my biotech background with intensive research to design novel adaptive clinical trial frameworks and help drugs reach patients more efficiently. My volunteer work will continue to support manufacturing, while my doctoral studies will help improve trial success rates and broaden my impact across the drug-to-patient pipeline.

I’m excited to be returning to both the Gates Cambridge and Corpus communities for my PhD. The friends I've made at Corpus have been a steady support throughout the celebrations and trials of my MPhil, and I feel fortunate to be doing my PhD in such a warm and welcoming community. I am very much looking forward to the next four years of picnics in Leck gardens, Tuesday sit-downs by candlelight, and all the everyday moments in between that make life at Cambridge so rewarding."

Larom Segev will begin her PhD in Physics. "I am currently finishing a concurrent bachelor’s and master’s in Astrophysics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, where I have focused on commissioning instrumentation to study the universe’s earliest moments, evolution, and composition. I have contributed to commissioning efforts at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, developed RF receiver systems for axion dark matter experiments, and built radio instrumentation for transient detection. Through this work, I became interested in how new observational tools can open entirely unexplored windows into the cosmos. These experiences have shaped my interest in experimental cosmology and the challenge of measuring extremely faint signals. During my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I will focus on developing digital backend systems and instrumentation for 21-cm cosmology. I am particularly interested in probing the Cosmic Dark Ages, before the first stars formed, when the universe was filled with cold neutral hydrogen. Detecting this signal is challenging due to bright foreground emission, atmospheric effects, and human-made interference, and I hope to contribute to efforts to overcome these barriers, including future experiments in radio-quiet environments such as the far side of the Moon. I look forward to joining the Gates Cambridge community and Corpus Christi College."

Rishi Goel will begin his PhD in Physics. "I grew up in Australia and completed a BAdvSc in Physics at the University of Queensland, where I became deeply interested in the societal implications of emerging technologies, inspired by the concept of “weapons of math destruction”. This led me to explore quantum technologies, particularly the interface between quantum and classical resources, where foundational physics can have industrial applications. As a PhD student in theoretical quantum information, my research aims to advance our understanding of these systems in a way that is equitable, accessible, and oriented towards the common good. Practically, I will explore avenues for quantum advantage through quasiprobability frameworks, metrological algorithms and contextuality. I hope to help develop quantum tools which revolutionize healthcare, address climate challenges, and enable breakthroughs in materials science. I am very excited to join the Gates Cambridge community, where the scholarly commitment to rigorous research and positive social impact mirror my own ambitions."