kemiso

I don't know about this year, but I've had friends apply to UW in the past, and my sense is that everyone is on the waitlist at first. The way to get offered funding there is to visit and show your interest in them. Talking to the graduate coordinators of some other programs this year, it seems that there has been a lot of hesitancy about offering definitive funding to any students they haven't met in person. UW, I guess, doesn't have an official prospective students weekend visit or anything, so it's up to you to take the initiative and arrange a visit with the graduate program coordinator. Sorry I don't know any current UW prospectives this year. Hope it all works out!

Definitely possible! Dr. Renaud Gagné at Cambridge was a Harvard PhD (pretty recent, too. 2006, I think?). And my memory's a bit rusty but I think Dr. Charles Weiss (also Cambridge) was a Yale PhD. Anyways, he's American. And this is just Cambridge's teaching faculty. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more with American PhDs on the research staff, and hopefully someone can step in and speak up for Oxford's situation. If Oxbridge is your end goal, a US education certainly won't hold you back