Occidental Joins Distinguished 25th Gates-Cambridge Cohort

The Gates Cambridge Scholarships are highly competitive full-cost scholarships awarded to outstanding applicants from outside the UK to pursue a postgraduate degree in any subject at the University of Cambridge. In many ways similar to the Rhodes, Marshall, and Mitchell Scholarships, as all emphasize intellectual ability, leadership and civic-mindedness, the Gates Cambridge differs in that it provides funding for postgraduate study at the University for the duration of the degree.

The Scholarship was founded in 2001 with a $210 million gift by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose major philanthropic foci are: health, equity, technology, and learning. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship program aims to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

Nicole Occidental, COS’22 Behavioral Neuroscience, minor in Health, Humanities, and Society
Mentors: Dr. Kate Baker (Cambridge), Dr. Andrew James (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences), Dr. Nicole Logan (University of Rhode Island), Dr. Ziv Williams (MGH), Dr. Charles Hillman (Northeastern), Dr. Suk Joon Lee (HMS), Dr. Bea de Gelder (Maastricht)

Nicole Occidental is an aspiring pediatric neurologist and physician-scientist who is on a mission to advance our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders and create new therapeutic interventions that will improve the standard of care for children who need it the most. As an undergraduate at Northeastern, she was a Behavioral Neuroscience major and joined the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health with Dr. Charles Hillman the summer after her freshman year to examine the effects of exercise on cognition. She also completed a co-op at the lab of Dr. Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard Medical School and a co-op and her senior honors thesis at the lab of Dr. Ziv Williams at MGH, utilizing rodent models to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying complex social behaviors, such as reward learning, prosociality, and inequity aversion. Wanting to further her experience with neuroimaging, she obtained her Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University in the Netherlands with a Fulbright Scholarship. For her thesis, she worked in the lab of Dr. Beatrice de Gelder to explore how affective haptic devices influence human threat perception in virtual reality.

Aspiring to take a more proactive and tangible role in improving someone’s health, she is continuing her studies as an MD/PhD student at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She is working on a project at the Brain Imaging Research Center at UAMS with Dr. Andrew James to investigate inter-subject and inter-session fMRI variability to more accurately track a patient’s longitudinal neurologic changes. 

Inspired by the children she now helps treat on her pediatric neurology preceptorship at Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the discussions she has helped lead as Vice President of the Neurosurgery Club and Secretary of the Neurology Club at UAMS, she intends to use her diverse research skills to tackle the currently unknown relationship between electrophysiological findings, pathophysiology, clinical phenotypes, and molecular mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders linked to synaptic vesicle cycling genes (SVC disorders). As brain function and cognition are dependent upon synaptic vesicle cycling – a process where synaptic vesicles are filled with neurotransmitters so that neurons can communicate with each other – it is critical to understand what happens when proteins that regulate this pathway are mutated and cause this whole process to go awry, as is the case in this group of neurodevelopmental disorders. Although SVC disorders are relatively rare, a better understanding of these disorders will not only give us insights that allow us to make novel therapeutic interventions for these patients, but also maybe for patients with other neurological conditions where dysfunctions in the synaptic vesicle pathway are also seen, such as autism, Parkinson’s, ADHD, and epilepsy.

As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she will pursue a PhD in Medical Science at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit under the supervision of Dr. Kate Baker. As her project involves her traveling around the UK to meet with children with SVC disorders and their families, she hopes that she can help close the gap between neuroscience research and clinical care. This experience will help her make a meaningful impact in the field and on the children she hopes to one day serve as she works toward providing the comprehensive, compassionate, and informed care that children with neurological challenges and their families deserve as they navigate what can be a complex journey. 

Outside of her research, Nicole enjoys CrossFit, longboarding, crocheting, and helping out in her mom’s bakery.

For more information, please see “New US Scholars selected as part of 2025 cohort.“