Princeton senior Mahya Fazel-Zarandi joins Joshua Yang as a 2025 Gates Cambridge Scholar

Princeton University senior Mahya Fazel-Zarandi has been named an international Gates Cambridge scholar, joining senior Joshua Yang, whose award of a Gates Scholarship for U.S. students was announced earlier this year. The awards recognize students for “outstanding academic achievement” and “social leadership,” and cover the full cost of a postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge.

The program was established in 2000 by a donation to the school from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.” Fazel-Zarandi, who is from Toronto, and Yang, who is from Palo Alto, California, are among the approximately 80 winners in the 25th anniversary cohort. 

Mahya Fazel-Zarandi is a molecular biology major who is also earning a certificate in quantitative and computational biology and will pursue an MPhil in medical science at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. She then plans to attend medical school. She is a 2022 recipient of the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence.

Her senior thesis “sheds new light on how long-used anticancer drugs — including 5-fluorouracil and Alimta, which was discovered at Princeton by Ted Taylor — actually work,” said her adviser Joshua Rabinowitz, professor of chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

“Her findings challenge assumptions about their action and support the design of better therapies,” said Rabinowitz, who is also the director of the Princeton branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. “Her research is both innovative and impactful — remarkable for an undergraduate.”

Yibin Kang, the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology, has mentored Fazel-Zarandi since her first year at Princeton and lauded “her exceptional ability to balance rigorous academics, innovative research, and dedicated advocacy.”

In 2023, Fazel-Zarandi founded Women’s Health Without Borders, leading weekly workshops on women’s health for women in New Jersey who are refugees, and has volunteered at various healthcare facilities, including Penn Medicine Princeton Health, all four of her years at Princeton.

In her personal statement for the award, Fazel-Zarandi wrote that working with the women in both capacities has “strengthened my determination to improve healthcare for women, particularly in prevention and personalized treatments.”

Michael Levine, the Anthony B. Evnin ’62 Professor in Genomics, lauded Fazel-Zarandi’s “special spark of curiosity and purpose” both in his genetics class and in her reporting as a research correspondent for The Daily Princetonian, where she displayed “a knack for describing complex biological processes in a simple and linear manner that is easily understood by nonspecialists.”  

She is also co-founder and co-president of Princeton’s Association of Women in STEM. She served as an undergraduate course assistant for an introductory course on statistics and machine learning. A member of Yeh College, she is a residential college adviser.

Joshua Yang is a philosophy major with a minor in journalism and plans to pursue an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at Cambridge in preparation for a career as a journalist. He hopes to begin his career reporting from India or Pakistan. This summer, he will be interning at the international desk of The Washington Post covering foreign breaking news.

While at Princeton, Yang has published articles on India, Israel and Hong Kong in media outlets including Foreign Policy, The Nation and the LA Review of Books, among others. His international experiences have included a Streicker Fellowship in New Delhi, a semester at the University of Oxford, a Dale Summer Award for a project in Hong Kong, and a fall break trip to Berlin for the journalism course “Migration Reporting.”

His reporting work in India “convinced me that I could spend decades in South Asia and still have more to learn about the region’s dynamic and contradictory forces,” he wrote in his personal statement for the award.

Yang is writing a senior thesis on jurisprudence (philosophy of law) and legal normativity. His adviser is Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, professor of politics and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

“Working with Joshua is an unmitigated pleasure,” George said. “He’s a morally and intellectually serious young man who thinks rigorously about the deepest issues. His senior thesis explores different perspectives on the perennial question of whether, and if so how, law creates or reinforces moral obligation.”

Sarah McGrath, professor of philosophy and adviser for one of Yang’s two junior papers, described him as a scholar who is “philosophically serious, creative and entirely capable of doing excellent independent research, seeking advice and feedback only after a truly impressive amount has been accomplished.”

In his journalism, “Joshua's determination to report on social justice issues is particularly noteworthy,” said Deborah Amos, a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence. “During our trip to Berlin, he managed to gain access to a Ukrainian refugee center at the former Tempelhof airport. His reporting included not only compelling interviews but also a personal touch, with a memorable meal shared with a family eager to tell their story.”

A member of Mathey College, Yang is an undergraduate fellow in the James Madison Program, a member of the Edwards Collective and a student representative on the Department of Philosophy’s undergraduate curriculum committee. He has served as associate editor of The Daily Princetonian, contributing editor for The Nassau Weekly and co-director of New York TigerTrek, which brings Princeton students to New York for a week of conversations with creative professionals, journalists and entrepreneurs. He has also interned at Zette, a journalism tech startup.

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