October 9, 2022
Black Excellence: Three Howard University Students Selected as Fulbright Scholars
Howard University announced three of its students this year will have the honor of becoming Fulbright Scholars.
The prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program will allow the students the opportunity to travel to Greece, the U.K., and South Africa to research and represent the HBCU.
Students can also pursue graduate study, and teach English abroad while exchange students come to the U.S. through the Fulbright Visiting Scholars program.
Dating back to the early 1950s, Howard University has had a long list of participants in the program.
The three students the school has announced this year are: Racheal Ayankunbi, Ashleigh Brown-Grier, and Carl Romer.
Ayankunbi, who graduated this year summa cum laude with a B.S. in biology and a minor in chemistry, will study the role of epigenetic regulators in the development of bladder cancer. The Maryland native will be based at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, Greece.
Brown-Grier, a Ph.D. candidate in Howard’s higher education leadership and policy studies program, will focus on international student experiences at HBCUs during COVID-19. She will spend nine months in South Africa for the 2022-2023 academic year, studying Black institutions of higher learning and examining the apartheid-era inequities that affected them and the impacts faced during COVID-19.
In her 2016-2017 academic year, Brown-Grier spent 10 months at a secondary school in Malaysia as a Fulbright English teaching assistant.
Romer, who also graduated from Howard this year with a B.S. in economics and a minor in philosophy, will continue his studies in those areas at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom, where he’ll work towards an MSc in economics and philosophy.
Since graduating, Romer has worked as an active member of the HU Chess Club. Since graduating, Romer has worked as an economic consultant and a research assistant.
In his most recent role, Romer served as a data analyst at the California Policy Lab at UCLA.
He was also an active member of the HU Chess Club, and he looks forward to bringing the skills he learned to LSE’s chess society.
These three honorees are among the thousands who have been selected over the years as part of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, that’s in partnership with many other HBCU institutions across the country.