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Washington DC, Howard University campus sign

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Three Howard University students are among the dozens of other students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) who have been selected as Fulbright Scholars.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers fellowship opportunities for graduating seniors and graduate students to study or teach English abroad, while exchange students come to the U.S. through the Fulbright Visiting Scholars program. Howard has participated in the prestigious program since the 1949-50 academic year.

For 2022-23, the school has announced the program will allow the students the opportunity to travel to Greece, the U.K., and South Africa to research and represent the HBCU, per Black Enterprise.

The three students Howard named this year are: Racheal Ayankunbi, Ashleigh Brown-Grier and Carl Romer.

 

Per BET.com, here’s more about the three Howard Fulbright scholars:

Racheal Ayankunbi graduated this year summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in bachelor’s in biology and double minors in chemistry and classical civilization. She participated in the Karsh STEM Scholars Program and held two Summer internships at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Gateways to the Laboratory at Weill Cornell’s Tri-Institutional M.D.-Ph.D. Program. In the Fulbright program, Ayankunbi will be studying the role of epigenetic regulators in the development of bladder cancer. She will be based at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, Greece.

Ashleigh Brown-Grier is a Ph.D. candidate in Howard’s higher education leadership and policy studies program. She is also an Ernest E. Just – Percy L. Julian Scholar and was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Malaysia during the 2016-2017 grant year. She also founded the Fulbright HBCU social media pages. She is also the founder and executive director of iHBCUx, whose aim is to provide awareness to HBCU students about government-funded international exchange opportunities. For the 2022-23 academic year, Brown-Grier will be based in South Africa, studying Black institutions of higher learning in the country. She will examine how apartheid-era inequalities affected them and how they were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Carl Romer also graduated from Howard this year and is an economic consultant at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), he also worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution, and a data analyst at the California Policy Lab at UCLA. He helped to form a union at the Brookings Institution with the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union. While at Brookings, he did research on the economic patterns in Black households and Black-owned businesses at macro and micro levels. He will be based at the London School of Economics where he will pursue a Master of Science (MSc) in economics and philosophy.

The full 2022 list of Fulbright HBCU Institutional Leaders list includes the following schools:

Alcorn State University

Bennett College

Bluefield State University

Central State University

Delaware State University

Fayetteville State University

Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University

Howard University

Huston-Tillotson University

Jarvis Christian University

Lincoln University of Pennsylvania

Mississippi Valley State University

Morgan State University

North Carolina A&T State University

Spelman College

Tennessee State University

Texas Southern University

Tuskegee University

Virginia State University

SEE ALSO:

White House HBCU Scholars Highlight Need For More Investment In Black Colleges

‘Lift Up’ HBCUs: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Emphasizes Need To Boost Black Colleges

Black History In The Making: HBCU Graduates Who Are Changing The World
HBCU alumni composite pic
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