Three Tapped For Gates Scholarship

Three Harvard students—a Mather House senior, the First Class Marshal of the class of 2003, and a first year law student—were named Gates Cambridge Scholars yesterday, providing them with full funding for graduate study at Cambridge University.

Inna I. Zakharevich ’06, Krishnan N. Subrahmanian ’03, and Adam C. Jed of Harvard Law School will study pure mathematics, education, and law respectively at Cambridge.

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship was created in October 2000 with a $210 million gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and funds the studies of approximately 230 students at any given time, according to the scholarship’s website.

Harvard’s three Gates Scholars this year is a drop from recent years—Harvard had six in 2005 and eight in 2004—but it still leads overall, with more than 30 Gates Scholars selected since the program began in 2001.

Princeton had the most Gates Scholars this year, with five.

Zakharevich, a math concentrator, wrote in an e-mail last night that she was very excited to be going to Cambridge University next year.

“I’ve been wanting to attend [Cambridge] since I first heard about their graduate math program, and the only thing I was worried about was finding the funding to attend,” she wrote.

Byerly Professor of Mathematics Yum-Tong Siu, who taught Zakharevich in Mathematics 260a, “Introduction to Algebraic Geometry,” this fall, said yesterday that he was “quite impressed” by her as a student.

“[Math 260a is] a rather small class, so many of the students are graduate students. She was among a handful of undergraduate students, and I was especially impressed that she could keep up with the more advanced graduate students,” he said.

Subrahmanian, who was the First Senior Class Marshal in 2003, currently lives in South Dakota, where he is a high school teacher. He wrote in an e-mail last night that he had “mixed feelings” about leaving South Dakota to head to England.

“I love my job teaching high school a great deal,” he wrote. “I am very sad to be leaving my students, however I am excited for the amazing learning opportunities that await at Cambridge.”

He said that he plans to study “the education of children in post-colonial states and emerging democracies” at Cambridge University.

Other marshals from the class of 2003 called him a “great human being” and said that the study of education sounded like a good fit for him.

“I’ve been a teacher before...teaching requires, if anything, patience and the ability to connect with people, and he has those attributes in abundance,” said James C. Coleman, Jr. ’03. “You feel absolutely comfortable around him.”

Luke R. Long ’03 agreed, and said, “I just see him pouring himself into everything he does. He’s a high energy person.”

Jed, who received his bachelors degree from Yale University in 2003 and worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia before coming to Harvard Law School, wrote in an e-mail that he plans to study “the imposition of state power on private parties to achieve social goals” while at Cambridge University, adding that he will focus on “accommodation mandates that accompany anti-discrimination law.”

He wrote that he hopes to eventually practice public interest law.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.