Alina Utrata ’17 wins 2020 Gates Cambridge Scholarship

Alina Utrata (’17), a former Center student assistant and one of the first Stanford students to graduate with a minor in Human Rights, was recently awarded with a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a PhD at Cambridge University.

 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation established the Gates Cambridge Scholars “to create a network of future leaders from around the world who will bring a new vision and commitment to improving the life circumstances of citizens in their respective countries.” Twenty-eight Scholars from the US were selected in January to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree in any subject available at the University of Cambridge. Utrata’s research at Cambridge will seek to address the impact that Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley have had on international relations, and how new technologies are changing the international system and the very foundation of the nation-state.

Utrata (‘17) completed her undergraduate degree in History and the Law with a minor in Human Rights, where her studies focused on how international criminal justice mechanisms affect societies in the aftermath of conflict. She was a student worker for the 2016-2017 academic year, a Summer Human Rights Fellow in Cambodia, and served on the Student Advisory Board at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. While at Stanford, she worked at the Asian International Justice Initiative in Phnom Penh, the Balkan Institute for Conflict Resolution, Responsibility and Reconciliation in Sarajevo, the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau in Washington D.C., and conducted research in both Bosnia and The Hague. She went on to attend Queen's University Belfast for an MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice as a 2017 Marshall Scholar.