Our Bureau
New Haven, CT
Naina Agrawal-Hardin, a Yale College senior has been selected as a member of 35 US scholars who will join the 2025 class of Gates Cambridge Scholars, a postgraduate scholarship program that provides full tuition toward study and research in any subject at the University of Cambridge.
The U.S. scholars, along with 65 recipients from across the world who will be announced in April, will begin their studies this fall, joining nearly 200 other scholars already in residence at the U.K. university.
Agrawal-Hardin, who is studying how the effects of climate change are being litigated globally, will pursue a Master of Philosophy degree in the field of Anthropocene studies, with a focus on how climate change projections have historically been received by a wide range of actors, including within government, the fossil fuel sector, and the general public.
“My research will inform the emerging field of transnational climate litigation and sharpen debates about the distribution of responsibility for today’s climate crisis,” she said.
Agrawal-Hardin, who is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been part of several research projects as a Yale student. In the summer of 2023, with support from Yale Law School, she worked with research teams at New York University (NYU) Law School and the University of Oxford to study international climate change litigation.
Last summer, with support from the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, she conducted a research project on prospects for climate litigation in the Maldives, an archipelago off the southwestern coast of India, traveling to the country to learn about island ecologies and local environmental advocacy.
She has also served as an intern at Earthjustice, a U.S. nonprofit law firm that specializes in environmental litigation, where she learned more about domestic climate cases.
Her research in the Maldives confirmed an interest in expanding her horizons globally, Agrawal-Hardin said. This, along with an interest in better understanding advances in climate litigation in the U.K. and Europe, informed her decision to pursue the M.Phil. degree in Anthropocene studies at Cambridge. That the course is also based in the university’s Department of Geography, which will be a new discipline for her, was also appealing.
“It will mean I will learn a new way of thinking and, combined with my background in history, it will allow me to grow as a scholar,” she said.
The Gates Cambridge Scholars program was established in 2000 through a $210 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since the first class in 2001, it has awarded 2,218 scholarships to scholars from 112 countries.
