Global Scholarship Funding

Mairead Whelan’s academic interests lie in the intersection between water, the environment, and population health. She is especially interested in global health, and how clean water, water scarcity, and climate change influence the spread of water-related illness and zoonotic disease. While at Oxford, she focused her learning on water management and infectious disease, contributing expertise in public health to a highly interdisciplinary program and faculty. She studied at Green Templeton College, a graduate college founded with a focus on health, humanitarianism, and social sciences. Aside from completing her classwork and enjoying the beautiful city of dreaming spires, Mairead also volunteered to mentor high school students in Oxford thorough their A-level research courses and was a member of the Oxford Union Debate Society. Mairead was set up to do fieldwork in the Ebro Basin in Spain and also complete her MSc dissertation fieldwork in Ghana evaluating the water, sanitation, and hygiene health conditions in live marketplaces when the COVID-19 pandemic hit – a very unconventional scholar experience! Although the situation meant cancelling these plans, Mairead re-routed her dissertation to focus on helping with the pandemic response effort and completed her analysis on how equity in access to water, sanitation, and hygiene may be impacting the dispersion of COVID-19 cases in the developing world.

 

 

Aneel Brar received a Global Grant Scholarship to fund the second year of his PhD studies in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on disempowered women in rural Rajasthan, India—specifically on how social forces become embodied as illness among pregnant women and young mothers. Aneel’s objective as a medical anthropologist is to translate lessons from research into policies and programs that reduce structural violence and advance health equity.

 

 

Romá Souraya received her BA in international relations from the University of Calgary in 2015 and received a Global Grant Scholarship to study international education policy at Harvard University. A native of Calgary, she lived in Lebanon and Brazil. She was the first person in her family to earn a university degree. As a student in Calgary, she volunteered with the Calgary Bridge Foundation for Youth, where she worked to help immigrant youth who were having difficulties in school.

 

Upon completion of her studies, Ms. Souraya took an internship with Girl Rising in New York, an NGO that promotes education for girls.

 

See where Romá Souraya’s career has taken her since her Global Grant Scholarship by visiting her Linkedin page.