MIT senior Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli and alumnae Abigail (“Abbie”) Schipper ’24 and Rachel Zhang ’21 have been chosen as Gates Cambridge Students and can start graduate research this fall within the discipline of their selection at Cambridge College within the U.Okay.
Now celebrating its twenty fifth yr, the Gates Cambridge program gives absolutely funded post-graduate scholarships to excellent candidates from nations exterior of the U.Okay. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to construct a worldwide community of future leaders dedicated to altering the world for the higher.
College students thinking about making use of to Gates Cambridge ought to contact Kim Benard, affiliate dean of distinguished fellowships in Profession Advising and Skilled Improvement.
Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli
Freudenburg-Puricelli is majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and minoring in Spanish. Her ardour for geoscience has led her to journey to totally different corners of the world to conduct geologic fieldwork. These experiences have motivated her to pursue a profession in creating scientific coverage and environmental regulation that may shield these most weak to local weather change. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she’s going to pursue an MPhil in environmental coverage.
Arriving at MIT, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Terrascope first-year studying group, which focuses on hands-on training regarding international environmental points. She then grew to become an undergraduate analysis assistant within the McGee Lab for Paleoclimate and Geochronology, the place she gathered and interpreted knowledge used to know local weather options of permafrost throughout northern Canada.
Following a summer time internship in Chile researching volcanoes on the Universidad Católica del Norte, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Gehring Lab for Plant Genetics, Epigenetics, and Seed Biology. Final summer time, she traveled to Peru to work with the Division of Paleontology on the Universidad Nacional de Piura, conducting fieldwork and preserving and organizing fossil specimens. Freudenburg-Puricelli has additionally performed fieldwork on sedimentology in New Mexico, geological mapping within the Mojave Desert, and discipline oceanography onboard the SSV Corwith Cramer.
On campus, Freudenburg-Puricelli is an avid glassblower and has been a instructing assistant on the MIT glassblowing lab. She can also be a tour information for the MIT Workplace of Admissions and has volunteered with the Division of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences’ first-year pre-orientation program.
Abigail “Abbie” Schipper ’24
Initially from Portland, Oregon, Schipper graduated from MIT with a BS in mechanical engineering and a minor in biology. At Cambridge, she’s going to pursue an MPhil in engineering, researching medical gadgets utilized in pre-hospital trauma techniques in low- and middle-income nations with the Cambridge Well being Techniques Design group.
At MIT, Schipper was a member of MIT Emergency Medical Providers, volunteering on the ambulance and serving because the heartsafe officer and director of ambulance operations. Impressed by her work in CPR training, she helped create the LifeSaveHer challenge, which goals to lower the gender disparity in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival outcomes by means of the creation of feminine CPR mannequins and related analysis. This group was the first-place winner of the 2023 PKG IDEAS Competitors and a recipient of the Eloranta Analysis Fellowship.
Schipper’s work has additionally targeted on designing medical gadgets for low-resource or excessive environments. As an undergraduate, she carried out analysis within the lab of Professor Giovanni Traverso, the place she labored on a challenge designing a drug supply implant for areas with restricted entry to surgical procedure. Throughout a summer time internship on the College School London Collaborative Middle for Inclusion Well being, she labored with the U.Okay.’s Nationwide Well being Service to create sturdy, low-cost carbon dioxide sensors to approximate the danger of airborne infectious illness transmission in shelters for folks experiencing homelessness.
After commencement, Schipper interned at SAGA Area Structure by means of MISTI Denmark, designing life help techniques for an underwater habitat that will probably be used for astronaut coaching and oceanographic analysis.
Schipper was a member of the Concourse studying group, Sigma Kappa Sorority, and her residing group, Burton third. In her free time, she enjoys fixing bicycles and enjoying the piano.
Rachel Zhang ’21
Zhang graduated from MIT with a BS in physics in 2021. Throughout her senior yr, she was a recipient of the Joel Matthews Orloff Award. She then earned an MS in astronomy at Northwestern College. An internship on the Middle for Computational Astrophysics on the Flatiron Institute deepened her curiosity within the purposes of machine studying for astronomy. At Cambridge, she’s going to pursue a PhD in utilized arithmetic and theoretical physics.
