Halfway through his studies at Camden's Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Jonathan Kanen is leaving, flying 3,500 miles away.

Kanen has been named one of 40 U.S. recipients of the Gates Cambridge Scholarships program. An additional 55 students from outside the country each year receive grants to study at the University of Cambridge in any field.

As Rowan University's first Gates Cambridge scholar, Kanen, 27, will wrap up his second year of medical school before taking off for three years to study for a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge.

"The whole Gates thing started with the realization Cambridge was by far the best fit for me. . . . They are a complete exemplar of how I think new discoveries about mental illness will likely occur in a big way," Kanen, a native of Ridgewood, N.J., said, citing integration of various disciplines and types of research, including rodent and human studies.

"This multitiered, very interdisciplinary approach is happening in a very big way at Cambridge," he said.

A perfect place, then, for a medical student who hopes to work on cutting-edge research and practice psychiatry.

At Cambridge, Kanen will be joined by other Gates scholars from the region, including Elizabeth Ann Walsh, an alumna of New Jersey's Passaic County Community College. Others include Nicolette Taku, Jocelyn Perry, and Cassi Henderson from the University of Pennsylvania; Cameron Langford, Samuel Kim, and Laura Cooper from Princeton University; and Christopher Rae from Pennsylvania State University.

Kanen's interest in human behavior led him to study psychology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor's degree in 2009, but he still found himself seeking answers about the neural bases of psychiatric maladies such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

After Vassar, Kanen worked in a New York University lab that was studying the neural processes underlying the modification of memories of fear. That line of research may someday translate into treatment of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, said Daniela Schiller, a psychiatry and neuroscience professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who was involved in the project as a student.

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Rowan medical student's studies are taking him far