Nehel Khalid Khanani ’09 and Lucinda Lai ’11 have been named 2012 Gates Cambridge Scholars, joining Sarah Mummah ’10 who was announced as a recipient in February. Khanani and Lai were named during the scholarship’s international selection round while Mummah was chosen in the first round for American citizens.
Recipients of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, chosen from outside the United Kingdom, pursue graduate degrees of their choosing at the University of Cambridge.
Fifty people from 23 countries were announced as scholars during the international selection round.
Khanani earned bachelor’s degrees in history and international relations from Stanford in 2009. After graduation, she worked at the Indus Hospital in Karachi on a pneumonia incidence research project under the purview of Interactive Research and Development.
She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in international relations at the University of Karachi while teaching Pakistan studies at L’ecole for Advanced Studies in Karachi, the city where she grew up.
Lai earned a bachelor’s with honors in human biology from Stanford in 2011. She then worked with the Burma Border Project in Mae Sot, a Thai border town. Lai is currently helping a psychiatrist and the director of social services at a torture treatment center write a book about global mental health on the Thailand-Burma border.
— Alice Phillips