Gangtok youth secures admission to Harvard's prestigious MDes programme

ISABELLA GURUNG

GANGTOK,: Gangtok's Ingsa Hang Subba has secured admission to the prestigious Master in Design Studies (MDes) programme at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he will begin his studies this September with a research focus that brings together Himalayan languages, artificial intelligence and the early detection of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Ingsa, the son of former Sikkim Public Service Commission (SPSC) chairman S.B. Subba and designer and researcher Ratna Loxsom Subba, completed his schooling from Taktse International School before pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics from Endicott College in the United States.

Admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Design's MDes programme follows a rigorous selection process based on academic performance, essays, recommendations and a portfolio of academic and professional work. The programme is regarded as one of Harvard's most competitive, with fewer than five percent of applicants gaining admission. It explores the intersection of design, technology, art and emerging forms of research.

Ingsa's academic and professional journey has reflected an interdisciplinary approach. Although he began his undergraduate studies in applied mathematics, his interests later expanded into philosophy. Professionally, he has worked across journalism, communication design, cultural interpretation and technology, with much of his work centred on the cultures, histories and knowledge systems of the Eastern Himalayas.

At Harvard, he plans to further develop Sound Topographies, a research project that explores indigenous Himalayan languages using computational design and artificial intelligence. The project investigates how patterns in language and sound can help reveal historical links between geography, migration and cultural exchange across the Himalayan region.

The research is also inspired by Ingsa's interest in the ancient Silk Routes and the idea of the Himalayas as a historic crossroads where people, languages, religions, technologies and ideas have interacted and evolved over centuries, rather than as a geographical frontier.

Beyond cultural and linguistic research, the project also has potential applications in healthcare. Scientists around the world are increasingly studying changes in speech and language as possible early indicators of cognitive decline and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. However, indigenous and low-resource languages remain largely absent from the datasets used to develop AI-based diagnostic technologies.

Ingsa hopes that, in the future, the linguistic datasets and computational methods developed through Sound Topographies could contribute to research on Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline among indigenous and underrepresented communities. He noted that this remains a long-term research direction and would require collaboration with medical researchers, linguists and clinicians.

During his time at Harvard, Ingsa aims to work across the fields of design, computation, linguistics, South Asian studies and, eventually, medical research. Through his work, he hopes to place the Eastern Himalayas at the centre of contemporary conversations on artificial intelligence, demonstrating that the region is not only home to cultures worthy of preservation but also a source of new knowledge, innovation and technological advancement.