David Posner (Immunology PhD 2020) is preparing to launch a new outreach initiative when he returns to his home country Mexico in August.
David arrived in Cambridge for his PhD after undergraduate study at Siena College in New York, followed by time spent as an au-pair and research assistant at KU Leuven in Belgium. Keen to inspire others to take advantage of the opportunities made available to him, he has instituted a number of outreach projects during his time at 鶹Ů, including a scheme which gave two Mexican medical students the opportunity to experience postgraduate life in summer 2022.
His upcoming project aims to increase awareness of and accessibility to a joint funding scheme offered to Mexican students attending the University of Cambridge by the Cambridge Trust and Mexico’s National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (CONAHCYT), the two organisations funding David’s PhD.
“These scholarships are really underutilised; maybe one or two students a year will get them,” says David. 
Although Cambridge offers many studentships annually for Mexicans, he is one of only three recipients of these studentships in his academic year. With financial backing from Cambridge’s Department of Medicine, David plans to prepare resources which will help academic institutions in Mexico to guide students in applying to Cambridge and for the studentships, an initiative which he hopes has long-term potential.
“I’m creating these resources almost as a step-by-step of how to apply,” he adds. “And I would provide the departments in Mexico with all these resources and this list of professors in the Department of Medicine or in Cambridge in general who want these students.
“There’s going to be this network coalition between all these universities in Mexico and our Department of Medicine, and that will ensure that more students are applying and more students are coming, basically for free, to Cambridge.”
David is very grateful for the support he has received from Caius in instituting initiatives such as these.
He says: “Caius has been a great place to be. They have great funding, and the people in charge are great in supporting the ideas for bringing students from Mexico.
“Every time I asked, they were very supportive, and it’s yielded a lot of really positive results for a lot of people, myself included.”
Working on these important outreach schemes has not detracted from David’s studies. He recently received a PhD Student Award from the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR). The prize of £1,200 is given to students working in any field whose research has real-world applications.
David’s PhD approaches Parkinson’s Disease from the perspective of immunology, the study of the immune system. The symptoms of Parkinson’s are caused by the death of neurons in an area of the brain called the midbrain, but the reasons why these neurons die have long remained a mystery.
David has found that in Parkinson’s Disease, the immune system contributes to inflammation in the area surrounding the brain, which is one potential factor causing the death of neurons.
“At the moment, it’s quite a simple idea, but in application you could think of using all these drugs that we already know how to use in transplant, for example, to affect the immune system and then use that to treat Parkinson’s,” says David.
After submitting his PhD thesis, which he will write while in Mexico, David will return to the UK to undertake his postdoctoral research at the University of Manchester.
