Dhruv Nandamudi among 34 Americans selected as 2019 Gates Cambridge Scholars at the University of Cambridge
The prestigious postgraduate scholarship program fully funds
postgraduate study and research in any subject at the University of Cambridge.
It was established through a $210 million donation to the University of Cambridge
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000; this remains the largest
single donation to a university in the United Kingdom. In addition to
outstanding academic achievement the program places emphasis on social
leadership in its selection process as its mission is to create a global
network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
The U.S. scholars-elect will join about 60 scholars from
other parts of the world, who will be announced in early April after interviews
in late March. The class of 2019 will join current Gates Cambridge Scholars in
October to form a community of approximately 220 Scholars in residence at the
University of Cambridge.
Dhruv Nandamudi, a Psychology graduate from Yale University
in New Haven, Conn, will be pursuing a PhD in Biological Science at the MRC
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Downing College.
As an undergraduate researcher at the Yale’s Center for
Emotional Intelligence and Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab, he became
particularly interested in exploring the impact of psychosocial stress on
neurological subsystems, he says on the Gates Cambridge website. As director of
the Yale Wellness Project, he helped design and conduct a large-scale study
aimed at better understanding the role of stress in student life, and
mitigating its more deleterious neural effects through the implementation of
targeted interventional efforts.
His studies at Cambridge will focus on exploring the
neuroscientific relationship between stress and memory control. His work “bears
particular relevance to mental health science for the clinical treatment of
mood and anxiety-related disorders,” Nandamudi says. “My goal is to better
understand the mechanisms guiding the interaction between stress and motivated
forgetting in an effort to inform potential treatment methodologies for
psychological disorders by enhancing cognitive emotion regulation,” he said.
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