Two Yale seniors and a recent Yale College graduate 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 two Yale seniors, Tenzin Dhondup and Lily Jackson, and Anna Rullan Buxo, a member of Yale College's Class of 2022, are among 26 social leaders who, along with 50 recipients from across the world to be announced in April, will begin their studies this fall. They will join more than 170 other scholars already in residence at the U.K. university.
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.
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.
