Cambridge Festival | Ideas That Could Change the World

Five Scholars will speak about their ideas that could change the world at this year’s Cambridge Festival as part of the ongoing celebrations for Gates Cambridge’s 25th anniversary. The Gates Cambridge event, “Ideas That Could Change the World,” will be hosted by international journalist Catherine Galloway who presents So, now what?, the Gates Cambridge podcast. It will be held on March 21st at Bill Gates Sr House.

The speakers are:

• Impact Prize winner Alexandra Grigore [2012], Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Simprints, the world’s first open-source biometric ID platform with privacy at its core, will talk about how Simprints has created safe and ethical biometric tools for use in everything from health to humanitarian aid, enabling more people to have access to healthcare and other support.
• Divya Venkatesh [2011], a specialist in infectious diseases who is currently a BBSRC Discovery Fellow at the University of Oxford, will talk about her research into how avian influenza adapts to mammals and the mechanisms underpinning the varying levels of host susceptibility to disease. Through it she aims to anticipate and respond to wildlife disease outbreaks and potentially, future pandemics.
• Carol Ibe [2015], a plant scientist who founded the JR Biotek Foundation which empowers African agricultural scientists and smallholder farmers to co-create climate-resilient solutions for a sustainable, food-secure future, will talk about her work on food security.
• Josh Weygant [2023], a current scholar who is doing his PhD in Engineering, will talk about his research on 3D bioprinting. He uses bioprinting to create organ-on-a-chip systems, microengineered biomimetic systems which reflect the structural and functional characteristics of human tissue and can be used for disease modelling.
• Jennifer Gibson [2001], co-founder of Psst.org, a whistleblowing tech start-up company and a former human rights lawyer at Reprieve and then Legal Director of the Whistleblower Protection Program at The Signals Network, will talk about how her new organisation provides a smart new way for people to share public interest information and speak out collectively. It has, for instance, helped ex-Microsoft employee Holly Alpine to expose the scale of Microsoft’s “Big Oil” AI contracts, which aim to dramatically increase fossil fuel extraction.

Learn more and register.