Black Excellence Rising: 3 Howard U Students Named as Fulbright Scholars
Three accomplished Howard University students will be adding another accolade to their academic records when they embark on a new educational endeavor as Fulbright Scholars.
The Fulbright U.S Student Program is a prestigious scholarship opportunity that allows students to pursue graduate study, do research or teach English abroad while exchange students from other countries come to the United States through the Fulbright Visiting Scholars program.
Howard has a lengthy history of participation in the program, stretching back to the 1949-50 academic year. For 2022-23, the school has announced its latest additions to their list.
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 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.
These three scholars are among thousands who have embarked on educational endeavors with the Fulbright program. Many HBCU institutions are partners with the program and have been named as Fulbright Institutional Leaders by the U.S. Department Of State’s Bureau Of Educational And Cultural Affairs.
The 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
