Students

Nine Mason teams are participating in PitchFest, the TiE DC chapter’s region-wide pitch competition for university students.

With the guidance of LaNitra Berger, senior director of Mason’s Office of Fellowships, and thanks to a happenstance meeting between them, Soraya Ngarnim and Chanel Grice are fulfilling their dreams.

Growing up in the slums of Cameroon, Joseph Sany said he witnessed urban violence and police oppression regularly. He heard about genocide in Rwanda, and he saw more violence firsthand when he worked with NGOs and visited countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone during civil war.

Mason junior Jackie Luu is named a recipient of the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for the upcoming 2021-22 academic year.

A few days after Khalid Noor was born in Takhar, Afghanistan, the Taliban seized the province, and his family had to escape to another region on foot.

“We were constantly moving from city to another city,” he said. “When one district was taken or collapsed, we had to move to another.”

It wasn’t an ideal life, but Noor is motivated to change that for future generations—and he’s negotiating with the Taliban to do so.

Doctoral student Sharrell Hassell-Goodman is co-chair of the Student Voice Committee.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Mason doctoral student Marissa Howard was able to get back into the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM) lab, but now all the researchers are working on COVID-19-related research.

More than 400 students representing120 universities from across 30 countries competed to control a simulated pandemic. Three students from the Schar School advanced to the final round.

In March 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Mason graduate student and autism advocate Christine M. Condo published an essay in The Washington Post that changed her life.