Latest group of Ramsay Postgraduate Scholars head overseas

Thirty-one promising young Australians will fulfil their ambition to study at a top university overseas after winning a 2024 Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship.

Three of the 31 Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship winners in 2024: Zara Campbell, left, Callum Harvey and Orla Hogan. Photo: Jane Dempster

Thirty-one promising young Australians will study abroad at some of the world’s top universities after winning one of the most generous scholarships available for postgraduate study overseas.

The 2024 Ramsay Postgraduate Scholars will undertake study in a huge range of fields, including educational inequity, artificial intelligence and disinformation, a computational approach to understanding the Scottish Enlightenment, and the nature of moral responsibility.

Callum Harvey, one of this year’s scholars, said he wanted to explore whether artificial intelligence was an accelerator for disinformation and, if so, what the public policy response should be.

He said he was interested in undertaking “deep data analysis of narratives as they spread on social media, and the kind of content that allows them to spread”.

Mr Harvey said he also planned to explore, in his masters degree at Oxford, how disinformation could be stopped, or at least inhibited.

He said the top-down approach of trying to ban content had limitations and put governments in the dangerous position of having to regulate truth.

He intends to explore alternative approaches – ways that “minimise harm to the community but still gives people in a democracy the minimum standard for democracy, which is to be able to think and speak freely”.

Orla Hogan, in her masters degree at Cambridge, will investigate the Magdalene laundries of Ireland – homes run by Catholic orders of nuns for “fallen women” – where the women were required to work in harsh conditions without pay in laundry businesses which financially supported the homes.

“The church was allowed to get away with these horrific human rights abuses well into the 1990s,” Ms Hogan said.

She plans to interview women who survived the laundries to obtain more oral testimony.

“To date, there’s only been 90 survivors who’ve been interviewed on the record, even though people estimate that upwards of 40,000 people were affected by this, or knew someone who was affected by it,” she said.

Ms Hogan researched the laundries for her undergraduate thesis and has been in contact with survivor advocates. She will spend September in ­Ireland researching, before starting her masters in Cambridge in October.

Zara Campbell is one of three engineers among this year’s Ramsay scholars and she will undertake her masters in aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

She is particularly motivated to explore solutions to the problem of debris in the earth’s orbit.

Nearly 10,000 tonnes of waste material circles the earth, ranging from tens of thousands of objects large enough to cause catastrophic damage if they hit a spacecraft, to tens of millions of millimetre-sized particles.

“It’s really cluttered and it’s posing problems for operational satellites and spacecraft,” Ms Campbell said.

“It’s a really hard problem and I hope to learn more about space engineering to play a part in solving that problem.”

The 31 Ramsay scholars in 2024 come from nearly all states and territories in Australia and will attend top-level overseas universities including Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, King’s College London, Sciences Po Paris, Zurich University of the Arts and St John’s College Annapolis. Each scholar is supported with up to $90,000 a year for one to three years.

This year, 264 applications were received, more than two-and-a-half times more than were received in 2021, the scholarship’s inaugural year.

Scholarship candidates must have been accepted into a graduate program at a leading overseas university before applying.

Selection criteria include: character, leadership and service; academic achievement; future goals; and a commitment to advancing a deeper and richer understanding of our civilisation.