UC Berkeley Press Release
Two UC Berkeley students and one alumna named Gates Cambridge Scholars
BERKELEY – Two University of California, Berkeley, students and one UC Berkeley alumna are among 40 new recipients from the United States of Gates Cambridge Scholarships. In October, the trio will join fellow Gates Scholars from all over the world in pursuing graduate degrees at Cambridge University in England.
Johanna Hanink, Calvert Jones and Amparo Flores were awarded the 2006 scholarships based on their exceptional academic achievement, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to improve the lives of others, according to Ed Strauss, director of communications for Cambridge in America, which is based in New York. "UC Berkeley can be proud of what these three scholars have accomplished because the competition for Gates Scholarships has become quite formidable," Strauss said.
Now in its sixth year, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship program has brought more than 500 students from 72 countries to Cambridge for graduate studies in a wide range of subjects: the arts, science, humanities, social science, technology and medicine. Scholarships cover the full cost of study at the university, including living expenses, transportation and a discretionary fee for study-related activities. The program is administered by the Gates Cambridge Trust which was established in 2000 with a $210 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle to enable outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at Cambridge.
 Johanna Hanink |
A year at Cambridge will provide Johanna Hanink, a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley Classics Department, the opportunity to focus her work."I won't be taking as many classes, so I can spend most of my time doing research and writing," she said, referring to the Cambridge system that holds class time to a minimum while emphasizing self-directed research and one-on-one tutorials. Hanink will use her time at Cambridge to research how classical Greek tragedy from the 5th century B.C. influenced Hellenistic poetry two centuries later. A native of Ashford, Conn., she plans to return to UC Berkeley for her Ph.D. after receiving a master of philosophy degree at Cambridge.
 Calvert Jones |
A second-year graduate student in the School of Information, Calvert Jones hails from Silver Spring, Md. While at UC Berkeley, she has studied the organizational structures of decentralized groups such as volunteer disaster recovery groups. One of her projects examines how the CIA and other government intelligence organizations adapt to meet threats posed by loosely-knit networks such as Al Qaeda. Jones will continue these studies at Cambridge as she works toward a master of philosophy degree.
 Amparo Flores |
Amparo Flores received a B.S. in environmental engineering science from UC Berkeley in 1996, then went on to obtain a master's degree in engineering from MIT in 1998 under a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has since worked as an environmental consultant and a water quality engineer.
"I view this doctoral program as an opportunity to work on environmentally sustainable solutions in engineering; in particular, the implementation of ecological sanitation in developing countries," she said. A native of the Philippines and a resident of Oakland, Flores said she hopes to use her research skills in a leadership role to provide sound science in support of environmental policy, either within government or in a non-profit, non-partisan organization.
Flores, Hanink and Jones bring to 11 the number of UC Berkeley students to be named Gates Cambridge Scholars since the program's inception in 2001.