This story was updated on April 8 to include international scholars named to the 2026 cohort of Gates Cambridge Scholars. The U.S. scholars were announced in February.
Three Yale seniors and two recent Yale College graduates have been selected as 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholars, a postgraduate scholarship program that provides full tuition toward study and research in any subject at the University of Cambridge.
The three Yale seniors, Tenzin Dhondup, Lily Jackson, and Caroline Utermann, as well as Anna Rullan Buxo, a member of Yale College’s Class of 2022, and Lucía Amaya, from the Class of 2025, are among 76 social leaders from across the world who will begin their studies this fall. They will join more than 170 other scholars already in residence at the U.K. university.
Dhondup, Jackson, and Rullan Buxo were among 26 U.S. scholars announced in February. Utermann and Amaya were among 50 international scholars announced in April.
The Gates Cambridge Scholars program was established in 2000 through a $210 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since the first class in 2001, it has awarded 2,355 scholarships to scholars from 112 countries.
Tenzin Dhondup, a double major in the History of Science, Medicine, Public Health and in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (with a certificate in Spanish) at Yale, will pursue an M.Phil. degree in Population Health Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Dhondup, who grew up between New Haven and the Hunsur Tibetan Refugee Settlement in India, will examine refugee and migrant health outcomes across the life course, with the aim of advancing durable, evidence-driven approaches to humanitarian operations, health governance and resettlement policy.
At Yale, Dhondup contributed to the 2025 Tibetan National Health Policy, guiding health governance and service delivery for more than 100,000 refugees across South Asia, and supported the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and partner NGOs. As a research intern with Physicians for Human Rights, he led a study of asylum medicine services supporting over 5,000 asylum seekers from 125 countries. And as the first undergraduate fellow at Yale Law School’s Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, his research examines the global practice of medical repatriation and deportation targeting migrant patients. His policy work with the Kaiser Family Foundation produced national analyses cited in multiple Supreme Court amicus briefs, and his work with Yale New Haven Health System helped remove race-based clinical decision tools, reducing systemic bias for more than 2 million patients annually. He is also a director at HAVEN Free Clinic connecting uninsured and undocumented patients to specialized care.
Lily Jackson, who is studying Archaeological Studies at Yale, will pursue a M.Phil. degree in Archaeological Research at Cambridge. Specifically, she plans to work with the Henry Wellcome Laboratory for Biomolecular Archaeology in exploring livestock health and disease patterns during climate cycles in medieval Ethiopia. Through this work, she hopes to link herders and livestock as stakeholders in the environment and connect past climate change to challenges facing modern herding communities.
At Yale, Jackson’s research interests have also extended into ethnography, heritage management, and disease ecology. She connects these fields through the study of health and disease in ancient nomadic societies. Fieldwork in Mongolia, Ecuador, and Alaska led to her interest in human-environment interactions and their impact on health, social practice, and cosmology. She is also interested in questions relevant to past and present, such as the role of infectious disease in Eurasian steppe history and learning about deep time sustainable human-animal relations and land management. Her undergraduate research focuses on the role of ochre in structuring social networks in Terminal Pleistocene Malawi and her senior thesis identifies malaria in Iron Age Senegal. At Cambridge Jackson also hopes to continue her involvement in initiatives for health education and menstrual equity.
Caroline Utermann, a double major in Neuroscience and Comparative Literature, will pursue an M.Phil degree in Stem Cell Biology at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in the Storer Laboratory. Her research lies at the intersection of regenerative biology and oncology, investigating whether regenerative factors in mouse digit tips can be repurposed for tumor suppression, with the long-term goal of translating these findings into novel therapeutic strategies for targeting cancer.
At Yale, she has conducted research on the role of the gut-brain axis in Parkinson’s Disease. She says that her research last summer at the University of Basel, where she contributed to the development of next-generation CAR-T cell therapies for glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, confirmed her interest in oncology. Her comparative literature thesis is an original translation of the Algerian author Assia Djebar’s “The Naïve Larks” from French into English. Alongside her research, she has served as captain for the Women’s Club Lacrosse team, is a member of the Yale Women’s Water Polo team, and is a member of the Yale Political Union. She is committed to using her dual science and humanities background to improving public understanding of science through writing and education.
Anna Rullan Buxo ’22 will pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Cambridge. As a Yale undergraduate, she developed an interest in spectroscopic analyses of reaction mechanisms, particularly for reactions that relate to the environment and sustainability. Since graduating from Yale, she has worked as a teacher — first as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in South Korea, and then as a mathematics teacher in her hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
At Cambridge, Rullan Buxo will research iron additive effects on the efficiency of vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) in hopes of finding new, sustainable ways to store energy at a large scale. VFBs provide easily scalable energy storage, all while decoupling power and energy production. By utilizing in-line NMR and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) to analyze the mechanisms by which iron additives stabilize vanadium cations at high temperatures, she said, VFBs may become a viable alternative for large-scale renewable energy storage. “With this research, I hope to contribute to making renewable energy more accessible to the public and solving the climate crisis,” she said.
Lucía Amaya ‘25 grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, during the negotiation and implementation of the country’s peace accords. After graduating high school, she volunteered at the country’s Truth Commission, where she says she first encountered victims of the conflict and the artists who worked alongside them to foster reconciliation through memory and art. At Yale, she studied History and Human Rights with a focus on how political violence comes to be and what society owes to those it has harmed. Through research across Colombia, Mexico, Bosnia, and Argentina, she continued to find that remedies available to communities rarely measured up to the peoples’ own understandings of what had been taken from them. Legal frameworks recognized loss of life and liberty, she says, but not the futures that violence had made impossible.
She is currently completing an M.Phil. degree in Development Studies at Cambridge, with a focus on how post-atrocity memory museums in Asia seek to operate as sites of inclusive national development, she says. As a Gates Scholar, she will pursue an M.Phil. degree in Heritage Studies, researching grassroots memory museums in Colombia and exploring the relationship between memory and future-making by analyzing the languages and methods that communities use to narrate harm, resist forgetting, and imagine forms of wellbeing lying beyond current political possibilities.
