Graduate wins 2018 Gates Cambridge Scholarship

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship, established in 2000 by a donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is awarded to individuals from around the world who are academically outstanding and are likely to be transformative leaders across all fields of endeavour.

Alex was selected as one of 92 new Gates Cambridge Scholars from a pool of 5,798 applicants. 

“My reaction when I was notified was shock, followed by excitement, followed by the overwhelming urge to check if there’d been a mistake!” said Alex, who is currently completing his MPhil in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Alex finished his Arts/Law degree with Honours in philosophy in 2012. After spending six months in Europe following university exchange in Vienna, he returned to Australia to work as a research assistant to Professor Ben Saul at Sydney Law School before commencing his Master of Laws (Research) in 2014.

“I had so much fun as an undergraduate that I stayed to do a Master of Laws (Research), which was supervised by Dr Kevin Walton and Dr Michael Sevel,” said Alex.

Alex worked as a lawyer at King & Wood Mallesons while completing his LLM, and in October 2017 he started his MPhil in Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge.  

The focus of his PhD, which he will commence in October, will be asking questions about the relationships between normativity and the self, choice and identity, and luck and responsibility.

“I hope to use my research to develop a framework for thinking about the choices that matter from the perspective of distributive justice,” said Alex.

Read more about the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.