Hamid Gari, a senior in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, is one of a handful of U.S. students chosen to study biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Gari was accepted along with three Gates-Cambridge Scholars – two from Stanford University and one from Yale University – into the prestigious master’s program in Bioscience Enterprise at the University of Cambridge. He will begin attending classes there in October after graduating from Colorado State University on May 15 with a degree in biomedical sciences.
The University of Cambridge in England is one of the oldest universities in the world and is known for its strong math and sciences department as well as the 83 Nobel Laureates it's produced since 1904. The program usually only accepts four to five students from the United States every year.
"I'm very excited and, of course, nervous at the same time," Gari said about moving to Cambridge in August. “"I looked up the reputation of Cambridge, and it's kind of one of those universities that you don't think a lot of people have heard of, but when you look at it in a world scale, it's pretty up there with Harvard and Yale."
Gari moved to Fort Collins five years ago from his native Saudi Arabia to finish up his high school degree and to attend his parents’ alma mater, Colorado State University. He has taken advantage of research opportunities during his time at CSU, including working on the human genome project in Australia, investigating parameters of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at Stanford, as well as participating in research developing antiviral drugs against flaviviruses (such as West Nile virus and dengue virus) at CSU working with Dr. Brian Geiss, a research associate in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology.
