Tyler Hester ‘06 first got a taste of the British university life when he studied abroad at Oxford during his junior year.

Now Hester, two other current Stanford students and an alum will go to Cambridge, where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will pay for up to four more years of schooling.

“To study at a top-notch university like Cambridge with brilliant scholars and all of its traditions will be a great experience,” said Hester, who will research education reform for students with limited English proficiency.

The four Stanford-affiliated fellows are among 48 Americans selected for this years’ Gates Cambridge Scholarships.

Shamsher Samra ‘08, Albert Chiou ‘07, Elizabeth Dzeng ‘02 and Hester — also a current graduate student in modern thought and literature — were selected after consideration of their commitment to academics, leadership and community service.

With four winners in 2007, Stanford has now had 12 Gates Scholars since the program was established in 2000.

Katie Route, student affairs officer at the Bechtel International Center, said she was happy with four recipients but hinted that the University has a ways to go before it challenges some of its peer institutions.

“It’s not bad,” she said in an email to The Daily. “Harvard and Yale had more, but Stanford has never had more than two [in one year] in past years.”

At Cambridge, Chiou will pursue a master of philosophy in chemistry, furthering his work in the field of molecular chemistry.

Samra plans to pursue a degree in epidemiology in order to learn how to better treat heart disease and diabetes in India.

Dzeng’s studies will focus on social anthropology in relation to public health.

The multi-round Gates Scholars’ selection process culminated in early February with interviews in Annapolis, Md.

“It was definitely an unbelievable moment when I found out I had been selected,” Chiou said. “There were so many amazing people with such great accomplishments down in Annapolis, so I figured I’d probably need a lot of luck to get through that last round.”

The scholarship winners from Stanford all participate extensively in the community.

Chiou sits on the steering committee of a free clinic in San Jose, while Hester works with organizations to help teach English to non-native speakers. Samra serves as president of the South Asian Preventive Health Outreach Program and Dzeng works with the Johns Hopkins Center for Disasters and Refugee Response.

At Cambridge, they will have the opportunity to synthesize their studies with their extracurricular activities.

“While I am at Cambridge, I’ll be trying to use these novel technologies to study how medically-important systems such as telomerase protein complexes and viruses function at the molecular level,” Chiou said. “Like any scientist, I’m hoping that I will be able to make a meaningful contribution to our body of knowledge in those fields.”