Pakistani Student at Standford wins Gates Cambridge Scholarship

.........................Gates Scholars—about 100 will be chosen around the world, including the Americans—are selected based on their intellectual abilities, leadership capacities and desire to use their knowledge and talent to provide service to their communities and improve the lives of others. Since the program was established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, 17 students from Stanford have been named Gates Scholars.

This year's scholars from Stanford are Muhammad Bilal Mahmood, a senior majoring in biology; Chandler Robinson, a student at the School of Medicine; and Elizabeth "Eliza" Ridgeway, who graduated in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in English.

Committed to social change in Pakistan

Muhammad Bilal Mahmood, 21, was born and raised in Palo Alto and spent two years attending high school in Lahore, Pakistan. He plans to pursue a master of philosophy degree in bioscience enterprise at Cambridge.

"While attending high school in Pakistan I was passionately involved in traditional charitable activities," Mahmood wrote in his scholarship application. "Yet I slowly became wary of such efforts, realizing their ineffectiveness in a feudal society that restricts access to higher education and job opportunities. Still optimistic, I started to search for a sustainable means to establish social change in Pakistan."

Mahmood, who is minoring in economics, said his undergraduate studies in biology at Stanford led him to conclude that biotechnology could provide a path leading to social change in Pakistan.
"Recognizing it as a multidisciplinary entrepreneurial field, I saw how biotechnology has the power to sustainably bridge Pakistan's untapped medical and engineering sectors into a whole new vocational infrastructure," he wrote. "A biotech company could offer the highly educated, underemployed middle class more job options and higher living standards. It would also in turn allow wealth to permeate below the feudal-elite, and increase human capital."

Mahmood spent a year working as an intern in the Stanford Pediatric Surgery Lab. He is the co-founder of Gumball Capital, a nonprofit organization that has distributed more than $13,000 in microloans to the working poor living in more than three dozen developing nations, including Bolivia, Ghana, Nigeria, Peru and Pakistan........................

Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march4/gates-cambridge-scholarships-030409.html