UAB undergraduate student a finalist for prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship

Hriday Bhambhvani, a University of Alabama at Birmingham mathematics and neuroscience major in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a finalist for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, one of the most selective postgraduate scholarships in the world.

Bhambhvani, a UAB Honors College student from Birmingham, will interview for the scholarship in Washington, D.C., Jan. 27-28.

“I’m honored to be selected as a finalist for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship,” Bhambhvani said. “I look forward to meeting and learning from my fellow finalists and interviews in Washington, D.C.”

If selected, Bhambhvani would receive funding to pursue a Master of Philosophy degree in biological science at the University of Cambridge.

The selection criteria for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship include:

• outstanding intellectual ability

• leadership potential

• a commitment to improving the lives of others

• a good fit between the applicant’s qualifications and aspirations and the postgraduate program at Cambridge for which he or she is applying

Bhambhvani conducts research in the lab of James Meador-Woodruff, M.D., professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. The lab’s primary research focuses on understanding how different parts of the brain communicate with other parts via a variety of chemical signals, and how this communication is disrupted in schizophrenia. The current focus of the lab is on studying the expression of the genes encoding the receptors for the neurotransmitters, dopamine and glutamate, within individual cells in the nervous system.

Bhambhvani was previously selected for the NIH Summer Internship Program and the Amgen Scholars Program, and was named Honorable Mention for the Goldwater Scholarship.