A second-year UAMS College of Medicine student and former intern in the UAMS Addiction Research Training Program, which is based at PRI, recently received a Gates Cambridge scholarship to complete the Ph.D. portion of her M.D./Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in England.
Nicole Occidental worked in PRI’s Brain Imaging Research Center with Andrew James, Ph.D. Her project involved investigating the stability of individuals’ resting state connectivity and their brain representations of motor function over a four-week period of time using fMRI.
The prestigious postgraduate scholarship program. which fully funds postgraduate study and research in any subject at Cambridge, was established through a $210 million donation to the University of Cambridge from the Gates Foundation in 2000. Occidental is one of 35 Americans selected to be a part of the 2025 class of Gates Cambridge Scholars and the first to be named to the group from UAMS. The full class of 2025 will comprise 100 new Scholars and will join current Gates Cambridge Scholars in October.